


Veni ad me (Come to me)

by strawberrymilano



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Magic, Attempt at Humor, Charles Xavier has a Ph.D in Adorable, Demon!Erik, Erik is Crushing Harder than a 12-year Old Girl, First Kiss, M/M, Magic, Magician!Charles, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Puzzles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-12
Updated: 2015-02-18
Packaged: 2018-02-04 10:24:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 52,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1775689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strawberrymilano/pseuds/strawberrymilano
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles summons his first demon on a lazy Saturday afternoon. He wasn't expecting such a handsome, refined one to pop up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chalk Dust and Contracts

Charles rubs his hands, letting chalk dust sprinkle to the floor.

He’s been working on this particular chalk circle for the better part of the day, and his hands are covered in different colors of the stuff. Blue, gold, red, green, and silver chalk smudge up his arms to the elbows, and he’s fairly sure he’s gotten some on his face somehow. He likes color-coding the different types of wards; it makes it easier for him to check for any mistakes. _And_ it happens to be prettier.

Some other magicians Charles knows can make their work incredibly dull. His teacher, for example. Charles likes to throw in little things that make spells more fun, always has, and today is no exception. He’s thrown in some extra sigils today, just to show off. The specialized valknut is particularly exciting, because he doesn't know if it’s actually going to work.

Everything looks to be in order, so Charles grins and claps his hands together. The lights above him flicker off as a burst of energy pops his eardrums. The chalk sigils filling the room begin to glow in all their different colors.

He takes a breath, closes his eyes, and begins to chant the summoning spell that he has had memorized before he learned to walk. The words reverberate through the room, magnified by the magic he pushes through each syllable.

“ _Parti vitali transgredi. O daemon infernalis aeternum, mihi veni. Leges universae qui vocatus mandant vel accipetis, vel te tollent. O Ignis Magnus Metalli invictus, mihi veni!_ ”

(He hopes the demon he’s summoning won’t be offended by the word choices of the spell. Really, in Charles’ experience, telling people that you’re going to destroy them if they don’t obey your summons is not a good way to introduce yourself.)

When the final echoes of Charles’ words fade, purple smoke begins to curl up from the shuddering floor in the center of Charles’ carefully drawn Sigillum Dei. The smoke billows and fills until Charles can see the outline of the demon standing there in the shape of a man.

There is a faint smell, but Charles cannot place it. Usually the books say that demons fill rooms with sulfur and other such nasty odors, but this one is not so. It is nondescript, almost pleasant in its tang.

As the smoke clears in a flutter, Charles avidly takes in the demon’s appearance. He is a lean, muscular man with a crisp suit and tie. Dark purple horns, twisted and elegant, curl upward from above his ears. He stands with poise, hands in his pockets, as his tail flicks disinterestedly back and forth.

His eyes pierce Charles, sizing him up. A smirk curls his lips.

“To whom do I owe the pleasure of this call?” The demon asks with polite detachment. He checks his fingernails as he speaks. They are awfully long and sharp, Charles notices.

“Charles Xavier, at your service,” Charles cheerfully replies. “But you may call me Charles, of course.”

The demon blinks. “Charles,” he says, slowly rolling it off his tongue.

“Guilty as charged,” Charles says with a small smile. “And what may I call you, if I may be so bold?”

“You already know my name,” the demon says. “The chant..." 

“Well, technically, I suppose I do. Would you like me to call you Ignis Magnus Metalli? I would, it you prefer.” Charles idly rubs his itching nose with his thumb, smearing chalk onto it. “Oh, dear - ” He cuts himself off with a sneeze.

“Gesundheit,” Ignis Magnus Metalli says absentmindedly.

“Thank you.” Charles sniffs to curb off another sneeze. “Sorry about that, sometimes I swear I’m allergic to the stuff... But there’s the price of being a magician, I suppose, chalk is everywhere. Anyway, yes, if you like to be called by your full summoning name, then I would be happy to do so. Is there another name you would like better, though?”

Ignis Magnus Metalli stares at him as if _he_ were the demon spirited away from hell.

“Oh, bugger, is that too forward? Is it rude? Should I not be asking for your other names?” Charles wishes that there were more books on these kinds of things. He wouldn’t have embarrassed himself so quickly if he’d just known a little more about demonic social customs. “Well, don’t answer that, then. I shall simply call you Magnus for the sake of expediency, if it isn’t too much trouble. Is Magnus acceptable?”

“Magnus is... fine, yes.”

“Oh, excellent. Well, Magnus, it’s lovely to meet you.” Charles smiles at him. “This is my first summoning, and I must say, you are absolutely magnificent!”

Magnus looks surprised, but says nothing. His tail isn’t flicking back and forth anymore. Charles wonders if he’s forgot to apologize for something else that he’s done wrong, something that could be construed as rude...

“Yes, oh! And I’m terribly sorry about the wording of that summoning spell, really. I aim on coming up with a new one that isn’t quite so... demanding, but, well.” Charles shrugs. “I have to perfect it first, before I start using it. Optimistically, I’ll have the testing done by the end of the month to use it for a full-scale summons. I do hope you weren’t offended?”

Magnus raises an eyebrow and minutely shakes his head.

“Oh, good.” Charles smiles, relieved. “And now, to business, if you don’t mind.”

Charles claps his hands together and pulls out a golden chain from the palm of his hand. At the end is a small watch, with beautiful, curved designs carved on its face.

“What’s that?” Magnus asks.

“Oh, I am glad you asked. This is something I cobbled together from several spells after a great deal of research. You see, I have read that demons are unduly uncomfortable in their taken forms on this dimension due to the stresses of stabilizing with the surrounding environment. This watch,” he held it up, “is an experimental attempt at relieving that discomfort. It is imbued with constrained flames of hell to recreate a comfortable environmental basis for an individual from the demon plane, and is also a protective amulet against destabilization of magical form and illusion. In effect, it makes the demonic form in the human plane painless and effortless to maintain. In theory, anyway.”

Magnus stares at the watch with fascination.

“Here you are.” Charles tosses the watch over to Magnus in a carefully aimed puff of wind. He catches it deftly. Charles can see the effect of the watch immediately. Magnus straightens up, the lines in his forehead fall away, and he hums with power.

“It works,” Magnus says, astonished. He flexes his fingers, watching as his claws recede into normal fingernails. He flicks the claws out again. Testing the limits of his control, Charles assumes.

“Excellent, I rather hoped it would. I wouldn’t want you to be forcibly uncomfortable. Keep it on your personhood and it should keep working as long as that watch is ticking.”

Magnus tucks the watch into his waistcoat like an old-fashioned pocket watch. It looks marvelous and stately, just like the rest of him.

Charles claps his hands together again and twists. When he pulls them apart, a folder is in his hands. “Now, Magnus, this folder I have here holds a contract that I have drawn up for our potential partnership. It is rather long, of course, and I advise you to read the whole thing through before you make your decision.”

“Decision?”

“To agree to work with me or not.” Charles had thought that should have been obvious.

“And if I decided against it? What would happen then?” Magnus eyes him suspiciously.

“Well, I wouldn’t be a prat. I would send you right back to your home, of course.” Charles looks coolly right back at him, after putting two and two together. “I wouldn’t presume to control you and use you through punishments and spells. I do hear other magicians prefer that method, but it is not one I agree with.”

Charles pulls a pen out of his shirt pocket and clips it onto the edge of the folder before sending it all over to Magnus in another puff of air. Magnus opens it with care, brow furrowed, and begins to read over the terms.

Charles knows that the contract is at least ten pages long, and Magnus looks like a very thorough, precise individual, so he assumes it will take some time before Magnus comes to his decision. In the meantime, Charles feels as if he can take a bit of a break. He quietly claps his hands together and pulls out an empty teacup from his palm. Charles circles the edge with a finger, and the cup fills with hot tea.

He sips from it and his eyes close in pleasure. One of his best little creations: a teacup that can infinitely refill itself. Divine. Maybe he’ll change the flavor in his next cup; he does like Earl Grey, but he has had a taste for Rooibos recently.

He’s on his fourth cup when Magnus is finished reading.

“I have questions,” Magnus states, “and I will have them answered before I sign anything.”

That sounds promising. “Of course, any questions you may have I will answer to the best of my ability.” Charles takes his last sip of Rooibos tea. “Fire away.”

“Is this contract magically upheld?”

Charles frowns in thought. “Well, yes. As it says on page five, if any magical or non-magical violence is intended towards each other or any other being without the informed consent of both parties, the contract will disallow that violent action. In addition, if there is any order or suggestion that I make to you that is magically binding but causes you pain, or if you simply cannot abide, you may say so and the contract will allow you to opt out of that action with no punishment.”

“How else?” Magnus’ eyes narrow.

“Well, the contract also allows either of us to break it at any time. Once it is broken, you will immediately be sent back home. That spell is already woven into the contract, so there will be no need for me to do the honors.” Charles refills his teacup again, this time with green tea. “That’s all for magical constraints.”

“So I would be able to - ”

“Return to the demon plane whenever you so wish, yes.” Charles waves his hand airily while taking another sip of tea. “I would not wish to keep you here if you did not want to be here. And you can act as you see fit, as long as you aren’t violent.”

Magnus is silent for a moment. “And what would the purpose of this partnership be, exactly?”

“I rather hoped I could ask you questions about what it is like to be a demon, for one,” Charles says. “I am, for another, quite interested in refining my magic. And lastly, I would like to discover the whereabouts of my sister and recover her.”

“Your sister? Why, have you lost her?” A single eyebrow of his lifts sardonically.

“No, no. She was taken.” Charles stares into middle distance, thinking about that night. The sound of a window opening, the sound of Raven’s muffled screams.

He shakes himself back into the present moment. Magnus is watching him carefully.

Charles swirls his tea distractedly, clearing his throat. It looks like he has spilled some tea on the floor. That’s embarrassing. He finishes off the tea and puts the teacup back into his palm. “And yourself?”

“Hm?”

“What purpose would you have with our partnership?”

Magnus blinks. “ _My_ purpose? I...” He shifts from one foot to the other. “I suppose...”

“Please do take your time,” Charles says kindly. “I am sorry to spring this all on you so suddenly.”

“No,” Magnus says brusquely. “No, it’s fine.” He taps his claws on Charles’ watch while he skims over the contract’s cover page again. They make clear ringing sounds, like a line of bells in a glockenspiel.

He looks up at Charles, his gaze piercing. “My goal is to find a magician and kill him. If that can’t be done, then I can’t sign this contract.”

Charles frowns. “Who is the magician in question?”

Magnus’ mouth thins. “Shaw. You know of him?”

Charles nods his head. “He specializes in magical absorption and recalibration. I’ve... met the man a few times at international presentations.”

Magnus is silent, his eyes studying Charles.

“You must see that I am not a man of violence, Magnus, though I am no great friend to Shaw...” Charles rubs the back of his neck in agitation. “Why are you bent on killing him? Is there really a need for that?” 

“ _Yes_.” Magnus says fervently.

“But why? What has he done?”

Magnus grinds his teeth, but he answers. “He hunts us.” The words are bitten off with rage. “He hunts demons down and kills them. After experimenting on them.”

“Oh my god,” Charles breathes. “I can’t believe someone would ever...”

“So you do not believe that one of your own would do something like that?” Magnus sneers. “Or you do not believe the word of a demon?”

“No, of course I believe you, Magnus, of course I do, I am just... My god, I am so sorry. That’s... atrocious.”

Magnus looks mollified. “Well, what do you say now?”

Charles studies Magnus. “You are sure that there is no other way to stop him besides killing him?”

He nods.

“Then...” Charles chews on his lip. “I suppose I agree to that term, if it is true about Shaw hunting and killing demons in that horrible way, and there is no other way to stop him.”

Magnus grins triumphantly. Charles suddenly thinks about all the books he has read where demons lie to their masters to trick them into accidentally killing themselves. Charles brushes the thought away. “Would you have any other goals in this partnership? Hopefully they are not so violent.”

Magnus tips his head to the side, watching Charles. Considering. The curl of a smile is still perched on the edge of his mouth. “Hn.”

Charles lifts an eyebrow. “I’ll assume that’s a no for now. Well, if you do have any additions to make, you can just tell me later and we’ll be able to add them into the contract. It would not be a problem.”

“Good.” Magnus flips to the last page of the contract. He uncaps the pen, and after a moment of hesitation, signs his name in an intelligible scrawl on the bottom line. Charles wonders if it's the name he called Magnus in his summoning spell or if it is another name, closer to Magnus’ heart.

“Excellent. And if you would be so kind, I also believe I have to sign - ” Charles doesn’t finish his sentence before Magnus clips the pen back onto the folder and blows it back over to him in a cloud of purple smoke. “ – Oh, thank you very much.”

Charles signs the contract with a smile. Both of the signatures begin to glow bright gold, even though the ink from the pen was black. “Good, good. Looks to be all in order, then.”

He looks up at Magnus again before walking out of his protection circle and over to the Sigillum Dei. “That means there’s no more cause for this ridiculous thing to keep you hemmed in.” He bends down onto one knee and splits the Dei circle with one brisk motion. “There you are. Freed from captivity. Feel free to explore and roam about the planet.”

Magnus grins, showing off his many teeth. “And when am I to return, master mine?”

Charles blushes to the tips of his ears. “Oh, do call me Charles, please, there’s no need to call me master – and oh, yes. Communication. Returning. Yes. Um.”

Charles claps his hands together and pulls two small pocket journals from his palm. He hands one over to Magnus. “I’ve enchanted these journals to mimic each other. No matter where they are, no matter how far apart, what is written in one will show up in another. When there is a new message, the edges of the journal will glow. Oh, and you have to use a pen, I’m sorry, something about the graphite of a pencil doesn’t properly translate through the mimicking spell.”

Magnus rolls his eyes. “That is no hardship, I assure you. So, you will write me a message in one of these when you want me to return?”

“Yes, that’s the idea. You can also inform me if you need more time, or if you think you’ll be a bit late, or anything like that. I wouldn’t want to interrupt anything important on your end, of course.”

“Of course,” Magnus echoes with the touch of a smirk. Charles has the distinct impression that he is being mocked. Well. He knows demons are very prone to mischief, and a dig here or there is much preferred to some plan to kill him in the night or something.

He holds out his hand. “Well, it was a pleasure to meet you, Magnus. Please know that you are invited to dinner here at the house any time you like. Oh, and if you are in need of money, it can easily be taken care of.”

Magnus looks down at his hand, and for a moment Charles wonders if he’s committed another demonic faux pas.

Then Magnus takes his hand, shaking it with vigor and a sharp smile.

“It has been a very interesting summons, Charles. Do tell me when dinner is served.”

With that, Magnus leaves behind a cloud of purple smoke that quickly fades into wisps. He’s gone.

“That went well,” Charles remarks to thin air.

He tucks his pocket journal back into his palm and whistles a tune as he walks up the stairs. He has _got_ to scrub off all this bloody chalk before he goes to dinner; he can almost feel another sneeze coming on.


	2. Sulfur and Supper

On the very first page of the journal, it says in loopy handwriting: _Dinner is served at 6 p.m. I would love to have you there._

Erik runs a sharpened claw over the delicate edge of his newly acquired journal as he rereads Charles’ message. The make is high quality, it seems. He appreciates good workmanship. He slips it into the inner pocket of his suit jacket. It fits perfectly.

The sky is dotted with clouds pierced with golden sunbeams. Peace doves fly by, some of them coming only inches away from him before scattering. Erik supposes, with a wry grin, that few of the local birds are used to people invading their high perches on these ancient buildings. It is the same all over; the pigeons in New York, the sparrows in Tokyo, and now the doves in Rome all think they own the skies. 

Erik steps from the tip of the church steeple into the streets below.

It has been decades since he has been to Rome. Erik remembers when it was heralded as the center of the universe, the center of the world. Now, it is only the capital of Italy. Romana victoria, indeed.

He slips into the crowds that flood the streets, ambling across the cobblestones that shimmer in the heat. A summer day in Rome may as well be a day in hell, if he’s honest. He watches the cars as they honk and the nearby street windows as they swing back and forth, glinting in the sun.

Erik leans against a brick wall, watching the traffic go by.

He feels the thunder working below him, the generators powering the city, and takes out a cigarette from his silver case. He lights it with a flick of his thumb. The smoke trundles upwards as he breathes it out, and he watches it go.

He has never been here before, here in the world of the living, without feeling the weight of it scratching at his soul.

He feels so light.

Humans pass him by, chattering and smiling. For the first time in a long time, Erik doesn’t feel driven to rip them apart.

“That’s a properly drawn-up magical contract for you,” he says to himself, grinning. He stubs out his cigarette on the heel of his shoe. “Well, back to work for me. No rest for the weary, as they say.”

Erik falls through the brick wall and back into hell.

His secretary is not pleased to see him. She looks up from her files, shakes her head, and acid hisses out of her mouth when she sighs. It melts part of her desk.

It makes sense; she was talking to him about his schedule and leading him to an important meeting this afternoon before he’d stopped in the middle of the hallway, said ‘Damn,’ and disappeared. Summonings are always so inopportune when it comes to scheduling.

“Magnus, really, where were you? You couldn’t bother to stay another twenty minutes without taking off to who knows where?” she snaps at him from her desk chair, legs crossed.

“Awfully sorry, dear, I was called to the land of the living, and not entirely by my choice,” Erik says in a clipped tone. He brushes acidic runoff from his suit jacket. It burns instantly into smoke on contact.

“Damn those magicians. I’ll have to reschedule the entire board of directors meeting because of them.” She spins in her chair, typing away. “I’ll sort this out. You owe me a bottle of blood-vipers and a new desk for this.”

“Thank you, Acidia. Make sure to get me my month’s schedule on my desk by the end of your shift.”

She flutters her dragonfly wings in response. The conversation appears to be over.

He heads into his office and looks out his glassless window that takes up his entire back wall, like a massive open cave mouth. Such a different sight from the streets of Rome, and yet so similar. Hordes of demons are running around down there, all trying to one-up each other for a promotion. The dark sky overhead looms with black clouds, and the fires from below burst up in columns to meet them every so often with explosive fervor. He feels the thrum of the fires and the metals as they pulse and roil beneath his volcanoes.

Erik lights another cigarette. As he takes a drag, he flicks open the pocket watch. It’s barely five over there. He has some time.

He snaps the watch shut and flicks his cigarette out his window and into the view. He watches the dot of flame fall through the murky air. It’ll plunge for miles and miles until it hits anything.

Erik jumps after it.

His wings cut through the dank smog, and he’s flying. He speeds after the faint glow of his cigarette, rolling through the air like a hawk after its prey.

Finally, he clears the cloud cover. The wind whips through his hair, and he grins at the sudden rush. The demons down below are as big as pinpricks, and the gnarled, blackened trees that hang off of the cliff sides whip at him as he coasts down the steep falls of the company headquarters mountain.

Just as the cigarette is about to fall into an outcropping of sharp rocks, he swoops in and snatches it.

He beats his wings back to stay level, hovering for a moment, and then steps nonchalantly onto a nearby company ledge. It’s bustling with low-level employees. Erik walks along the pathway, brushing off soot from his suit, relighting his cigarette, and folding his wings back.

The demons all around him scatter away in fear, just like the doves in Rome, staring at him with wide eyes. He takes a long drag from his cigarette.

“Enjoying your break?” Erik grins at them, smoke issuing out from between his teeth. They scramble to get back to work, hefting their heavy loads of mined metal and rock up and down the mountain.

He keeps walking along the leveled platform until he comes to the employee entrance that runs to the heart of the volcano. He opens the barred metal doors with a lazy flick of his fingers and goes straight in. It whips shut behind him. Erik struts down the massive tunnel, higher-level demons everywhere with their clipboards and data analysis spreadsheets scuttling from one tunnel to another. The electric lights lining the complex are flickering overhead; he makes a mental note to get them fixed.

He has to flick open a few more security doors before he finally reaches the dead end. It’s a colossal hunk of reinforced adamantium that Erik mixed himself that runs around the inside of the volcano. It’s lava resistant and protects the tunnels from collapsing in case of a flare-up. Employees call them the ‘shells,’ according to Acidia. 

Erik reaches out with a hand and reverently brushes his fingertips on the smoothed metal.

His eyes fall shut as he’s flooded with feedback; the entire shell hums at his touch. It knows him.

He sends a vibration through the whole structure looking for aberrations, like a spider plucking the threads of its tuned web. There are a few spots, he can see, that the layers are melting together and weakening from overexposure to the heat from the underground mining. Those have to be fixed immediately.  

Erik takes a breath, flattening his palm against the shell, and pushes.

Miles away, on the other side of the volcano, the edges of the shell bend and flex. The shell hums and the melted layers separate, hardened and dried.

Erik sends another ripple across the shell, and another, and another, until all of the problem spots have been patched up.

Finally, he steps back, grudgingly peeling his hands from the shell.

He has to get back to the office to pick some things up before he goes to dinner. He checks the time – it’s almost forty-five after five. Erik has fifteen minutes.

He rushes back, absently says goodbye to Acidia when picking up his month-long schedule from her, and grabs a pen from his desk.

With five minutes left to spare, he scribbles in next to Charles’ message: _Finished things up on my end in hell, ready for master mine to summon me back to dinner._

Almost immediately, before he can even think of how long he might expect to wait for a reply, letters scratch their way onto his page in the very next line.

_Excellent! I’ll draw up a circle immediately. See you soon!_

And a moment later,

_Oh, and really, Magnus, I thought I told you it wasn’t necessary to call me master. At all. Really. Please don’t, actually._

Erik grins to himself. He can almost feel Charles blushing, even though they’re literally on different dimensions. 

He writes back: _My mistake, my lord._

Suddenly, there is a childish scribble crossing out Erik’s “my lord,” and a hastily written “CHARLES” in all-capital letters right next to it. 

Erik snorts. 

A second goes by before he feels the familiar pull of a summoning spell. He tries to tamp down his silly grin, perhaps school his face into something a respectful, bashful demon would wear in front of an over-controlling master.

As expected, Charles doesn't fall for his innocent act for an instant.

“Really, Magnus!” As expected, Charles is blushing up to his ears again. “First master, now lord. Will I be a king next?”

“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that, your majesty.” Erik sweeps into a full bow, unable to keep the edges of his mouth from turning upwards, and offers his arm. “May I have the honor of escorting you to dinner, sire?”

Charles sighs into eternity, pinching the bridge of his nose. He has the look of a man who has realized he’s fighting a losing war. “Yes, you impertinent man, you may escort me to my own dinner.”

He grudgingly takes Erik’s arm and they process majestically into an ornate hallway. The ceiling is high and vaulted, and there are large glass windows overlooking a lake. The sun is shining through, and he sees the boughs of a line of trees drifting back and forth in a slight wind. The shadows of the leaves dance on the walls and paintings that line the hall. It’s impressively lovely, and it takes a lot to impress Erik nowadays. 

“Awfully good weather today, highness,” Erik says conversationally.

“Oh. Yes, I suppose so,” Charles says, looking out the window to gauge the weather in detached interest.

Erik glances over at him. “Does your magnificence – ” Charles scrunches his nose at that one – “ – not go outside much? Stuck inside reading and chanting in Latin, that sort of thing?”

“Well, yes, I do stay in the house fairly often for my work,” Charles says. “Drawing up circles, decoding ancient texts, learning dead languages, inventing new spells; all that takes time and effort.” 

“I’m sure.”

“And, well.” Charles pauses, and his voice goes quiet as he stares unseeingly out the windows as they walk. “You know about my sister. Can’t spend my days traveling the continent or going to the beach when I have to find her, you know.”

Erik watches him out of the corner of his eye. “Of course.”

He doesn’t know what to say next to get the life back into those impossibly blue eyes or the blush back on that pale face. Erik hides it well, but he feels a bit awkward now. He tries to come up with something, anything, but he’s floundering. It’s been ages since he’s had to be considerate of someone’s feelings in civil conversation; he’s rusty.

They wander down the hall in silence for a short while, Erik sneaking a glimpse of Charles every so often. He looks so far away from here. 

“You know, Charles,” Erik says tentatively, if demons can be tentative, “Magicians have summoned demons for far less noble causes than that, I have to say.”

Charles blinks back to himself, and his mouth twists in a wry grin. “Oh, yes, I’m sure of that. Wars, revenge, madness. I’ve read hundreds of examples in the history books.”

“Well, those too, I suppose,” Erik says a bit dismissively. “But there are much more interesting ones to choose from. Once, in Russia, I was called on by a nobleman who had faked his own death to follow his wife around and scare her as if she was being haunted by his ghost.”

“What!” Charles exclaims.

“And there was that magician in Spain who was so obsessed with appearance that he summoned me to get my honest opinion on his wardrobe.”

“No,” Charles says, fascinated, “That can’t be true! Who would summon a demon for that?” 

“What? It’s completely true.” And it was, too. “Oh, and there were twin sisters in Beijing that both wanted me to keep stealing each other’s hairpins. They acted horribly when they were pretending to be each other to stir up gossip.”

Charles laughs out loud, much to Erik’s satisfaction. “Magnus! Your stories are incredible! You should write them all down in a book one day.”

“Perhaps I will.”

Erik can’t quite wipe off the smug look on his face. He certainly feels a lot less rusty now, with Charles grinning at him with bright eyes when he was so gloomy a minute ago.

“And here we are.” Charles nudges Erik towards the large, paneled double doors near the end of the hall. The dining room, Erik assumes.

Erik raises a hand and effortlessly swings the doors open by their large metal handles. He pretends not to notice Charles’ awestruck look or his sudden surprised intake of breath, and keeps his preening to himself.

They approach the dining room table together. It is finely decorated, with high quality silverware and exquisite porcelain plates.

“What will we have the pleasure of eating tonight?” Erik asks.

Charles chews on his awfully red lips. “I wasn’t quite sure what you would like, so I had the chef cook up a spread, if that’s all right. There’s chicken marsala, filet mignon, grilled salmon, and a nut salad. I could ask her to make something else if that would be preferable to you...?”

Charles looks at him hesitantly, obviously expecting him to snappishly deny any of these meals. Erik wonders if it’s because he’s a demon or if Charles does this with every new dinner guest.

“All of those sound perfectly all right, thank you.”

Charles beams. “Oh, excellent, I was worried you wouldn’t like any at all! Excellent, excellent. I’ll call up the food immediately.”

And he does. Charles closes his eyes, traces a small sigil on the table with chalk, and the dinner platters appear on the table, still steaming.

Erik refuses to be impressed.

He sits down near the end of the table next to Charles, economically filling up his plate with a little of everything, and eats.

It is, of course, delicious. Erik tells Charles so over dessert.

Charles smiles. “Oh, I’m so glad. I’ll have to tell the chef. You are our first ever guest from the demon plane, you see, and we were worried you might not be predisposed towards human tastes." 

Erik smiles back, looking up at him through his eyelashes. “It seems to me, in many cases, that humans and demons have incredibly similar tastes, Charles.” He takes another sliver of pie from the dessert tray.

“How d’you mean?” Charles sits forward excitedly. “Could you perhaps tell me...What are the people like, in the demon plane?” 

Erik stops to think as he chews over a bite of lemon meringue. “I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that before.” He pauses. “I suppose...”

Charles is nearly falling out of his seat in anticipation. It makes it hard for Erik to keep a straight face. 

“I suppose they’re very similar. We have modern technologies over there like electricity, computers, and all the rest. We have businesses, coworkers, and layoffs. We have distant parents, lovers, and sometimes children.” Erik wipes crumbs off his mouth with a napkin. “But there are some differences. Demons don’t have any other school to learn from other than the human world. They have to sharpen up quickly and grow into their abilities, or they get trapped or killed over here in a matter of years. So even though most manage to brush up on physical skills, many don’t know any better than what is right in front of them. They only hold an instinct for cunning, and fail to use their imaginations to reach their true magical potential.”

“How do they compare to magicians?” Charles asks.

“Magicians are much more inventive, much more clever with their powers, because they have the advantage of years of preparation and extensive study. However, most human magic is also naturally weaker than most demon magic, so I suppose that most times it evens out.” Erik sits back and weaves his fingers together. “Demons are tougher, physically and magically. We can withstand spells and injuries that would permanently maim humans. The environment in hell is full of toxins that would most likely kill you instantly, and the terrain is constantly shifting because volcanic activity is constant. And there are many demons that are bloodthirsty to move up in society so that they can leave that harsh environment to more pleasant climes high in the city, far away from sulfur and sand.”

Erik thinks back to Shaw. His mood darkens. “And even though, for some reason, demons have been labeled in this world as absolutely evil, there are many humans, many magicians, that have been just as bloodthirsty in order to rise up in the human plane, due to much less rational reasons.”

Charles is looking at him intently. “So we are not so different after all,” he murmurs.

Erik looks back into Charles’ kind blue eyes with a sad smile. “No,” he says quietly. “No, we are not.”

It is on that note that Erik stands and makes his apologies, but really, Charles, he has to return to the demon plane tonight, and they can discuss more business tomorrow. It does not take another ten minutes before Erik sinks through Charles’ study and is back in his office in hell. 

Erik breathes in smoke from another cigarette, his feet crossed on his desk, as he stares out his glassless window, seeing nothing. Remembering.

He’s so wrapped up in his thoughts that he doesn’t notice the odd scratching sounds coming from the ceiling. 


	3. Tea and Timetables

_ssssskkkrrrrrrrrrreeeerrrrrrnnnrrrreeeerrrrkkkkkk_

Erik startles awake in his office chair. He whips his head around, but there’s nothing there.

He’s alone in his office. He listens for something, anything, but it’s completely silent except for the ticking of the clock.

“I could have sworn...” He mutters as he sits back and shakes his head. Ghosts and odd noises. He must be cracking from the stress of the job. The sounds must be due to office construction projects or something. Maybe the next floor up is having some work done.

He checks the clock on the wall. It’s already almost seven in the morning. Acidia will be out at her desk.

Erik creaks open his office door and grumpily shuffles over to the coffee maker. He ignores the scathing look Acidia gives him for sleeping in his office again and starts brewing his favorite blend. He doesn’t know what it is, exactly; he just knows it’s the one in the blue package. Acidia would know what it was, but he’s never really cared enough to ask as long as it’s still there.

Acidia keeps on typing over at her desk, judging him from afar with pursed lips. He diplomatically pulls out another mug and pours her a cup.

“Morning, Acidia,” he says once he takes his first sip of coffee and regains the ability to speak. “Is there construction going on in the office?”

She stops typing momentarily and looks at him oddly. “No,” she says. “The only construction going on right now is in the inner mountain sites. This building has been cleared until next year’s assessment.”

“Oh.” He sets her coffee down on her desk.

Her eyes narrow. “Why?”

Erik shrugs and takes a long drink of coffee.

Acidia studies him like she’s trying to solve an astrophysics equation written on his forehead. She picks up her coffee and drinks from it without breaking her fixed stare.

Erik gets this look from her all the time. He’s so used to it that it just rolls off.

He sits on the edge of her semi-melted desk and lovingly cradles his coffee mug in both hands. “Anyway, Acidia, about the magician who summoned me yesterday,” he says. “We’re having a scheduling meeting today at twelve, his time.”

“Where does he live? What’s the time difference? What’s his name?” She asks, grabbing a pen and scribbling on a pad of paper with one hand. Always sharp as a tack, his Acidia.

“Westchester, New York. It looks like we’re about four hours behind, from his watch. And his name is Charles. Charles Xavier.” Erik’s lips twitch up into a smile as he remembers the look on Charles’ face when he’d introduced himself with a handshake. A _handshake_. He’d been the only magician Erik had ever worked with that had ever offered him something as polite as a handshake. He huffs an amused breath out his nose, his eyes crinkling, and rubs a thumb idly on his warm coffee mug.

When he looks back at Acidia, she’s got a raised eyebrow and a calculating smirk on her face.

He blinks and the smile drops off his face. “What?” he asks defensively.

“Oh, nothing,” she says innocently, with a mischievous sparkle in her eye.

“Acidia,” he says warningly.

“Just let me know when to call the wedding planner,” she says. She starts doodling little hearts around Charles’ name on her pad of paper with a straight face.

Erik is too proud to sulk. He frowns instead. “Acidia,” he says sullenly. He hopes he’s not blushing. He goes purple when he blushes.

She shoots a grin at him. “That wasn’t a denial.”

“Hmph.” He finishes his coffee. “Anyway, I’m going to bring my schedule along to the meeting and write in everything we decide on together.”

“Ooh, _together_ ,” Acidia teases.

Erik ignores her like the professional CEO he is, even though he knows for a fact that he’s now blushing dark purple. “ _And_ ,” he valiantly goes on, “we’re going to have lunch, so don’t order anything for me from the cafeteria today.”

“ _Lunch daaaaate_ ,” she says while waggling her eyebrows.

Erik sighs in the exasperated way he does when his assistant is being especially ridiculous. “The _meeting_ is in about an hour, and I need you to divert my traffic from sales to Azazel. Also, I need to change.”

Acidia rolls her eyes. “You’re no fun. Consider Azazel on the case. You have a freshly pressed suit hanging up in the coatroom, with a couple of ties to choose from.”

“Good,” he says with a note of finality.

“You should go with the silver tie,” she continues as if she hadn’t even heard him speak. “It matches the purple of the suit and brings out the silver pinstripes. It also complements your suave debonair aura. Change your shoes to black, of course. You don’t want him thinking you don’t know how to match your shoes with your suit. And be sure to touch up your hair a bit. There’s shampoo in the emergency care pack I put in your desk, and you can use an employee shower down the hall. Go get him, tiger.”

She dismisses him with a flick of her wings, and turns back to her work.

It occurs to him that he’s never going to get the last word with her.

Erik rinses out his coffee mug and follows her orders to the letter.

-

It’s a calm day, and the clouds float past on the surface of the lake as fish dart around underneath. Not that Charles sees it. He’s nose deep in a new article on dimensional transportation and its effects on organic chemicals as he walks around his grounds.

He makes it through all the treatises in the magazine by the time he returns to the mansion. Each article is marked with underlined sections, his opposing arguments and questions scribbled in the margins. It’s the beginning of another couple of responsive essays he’ll send in to the scientific journals later this week.

Charles drops the magazine on the foyer’s hitchcock table and picks up the phone. He spins the finger wheel, just 0 for operator.

A woman answers right away. “Operator. What can I do for you today?”

“Yes, hello.” Charles double-checks the name on the article. “I would like to place a person-to-person call to a Doctor Hank McCoy.”

“One moment please.” There is a pause as she looks up his information. “You will be connected directly.”

“Thank you.”

Eleven rings go by until Charles hears the unmistakable sound of the phone being picked up.

“Hello, is this Doctor Hank McCoy?” Charles asks.

“Uhm, yes, it is. That’s me. Sorry, who is this?” He sounds harried. Probably in the middle of another experiment, if Charles has to guess.

“Hi! This is Charles Xavier. I just read your new article on magical genetics in Magic Monthly.”

“Oh, thank you, um, so you did you have a question about – ” There is a silence. “Wait, did you say Xavier? As in, Mage Doctor? Like, the magician Charles Xavier?”

Charles grins. “That would be me.”

There’s a quiet “ _Oh my god_ – ” and some strange, clunking sounds, as if Doctor McCoy had just accidentally run into a door or toppled over a table.

Then things seem to level out over there, and McCoy gets his breath back. “Doctor Xavier, can I just say I am a huge fan of your work, and I have read all of your scholarly papers, and it is such an honor that you read my article and wow I really think you are one of the great minds of this – ”

“Oh, you are too kind.”

“ – age, and, uh. Really, though, I mean, your paper on the potential applications of the Aerugo sigil was just mind-blowing, and your molecular studies basically, uh, changed the whole magical and scientific communities forever, and your paper on magic genetic inheritance made me want to be a scientist, and oh, oh my god, I’m probably word-vomiting, I am so sorry.”

Charles laughs. “Quite all right. Oh, and please, do call me Charles.”

“Call you – oh, oh my god, thank you, thank you so much, I will. And you can call me Hank, of course, I mean, uh, yeah.” Hank sounds breathless.

“Well, Hank,” Charles says. “I have just read through your results on comparative organic molecular work.”

“Thank you so much,” Hank says fervently. “Do you – that is, would you – uh, what are your thoughts?”

“Oh, it was marvelous. I thought your analysis was very well-worded, and quite logical.” Charles flipped open a treatise to the article in question. “I did have a question for you, if it isn’t too much trouble.”

“Absolutely no trouble, none, yes, please,” Hank says. He seems to be calming down a bit, with his speech pattern leveling out.

Which is a bit ironic, given what Charles is about to say next.

“Would you like to work with me on a project I had in mind?”

-

Erik stands up straight in front of the full-size mirror in the company bathroom, keeping one eye on the door just in case a random employee walks in.

He can’t seem to get his hair to behave. Erik wishes he had a comb or something – he drags a hand over his wet hair to try to flatten it more, but a bit in the back is still stubbornly sticking up. It almost looks like one of his horns, with the way it’s twisting into the air. His tail twitches with annoyance the longer he looks at it.

He straightens his tie one more time before nodding to his reflection. Most of this will have to do, but that small bit of _hair_. “Maybe Acidia has a comb,” he mutters.

He goes back to the office – remembering just in time to get the journal from his dirty suit – and goes up to Acidia’s desk.

She’s typing away, as always.

“Do you have a comb?” Erik asks.

She takes in his hair with a badly disguised smile and a raised eyebrow. “Do I have a comb,” she repeats.

He raises an eyebrow right back at her and gruffly gestures at the back of his head where he knows the calamity still reigns.

The grin grows on her face. “Why, so you can go back to the bathroom and try to comb it down for twenty more minutes?”

Erik scowls at her. “It will only take a second. I’m not going to go make off like a criminal.”

“No, I know that. The question is, are you going to go make _out_ like one!” Acidia giggles.

Erik plants his face into his palm in mortification. He is the CEO of this entire company. He controls thousands of enormous metallic fields per day. He has been called on to fight human wars for centuries. How has it come to this? Ridiculous. His life is a shambles. He is a disgrace to all demonkind.

“Oh, fine.” Acidia lobs a comb at him. It bounces off his chest before he can catch it. “Go obsessively brush your hair.”

“Fine,” he snaps. “I will. Your pun was still horrible.”

She doesn’t even blink. “My puns are still much better than yours. Now go clean up that third horn you’ve got there. You only have about ten minutes left before you’re summoned, and I want that comb safely back in my desk before you cross over.”

He self-consciously reaches for his hair before stopping himself. Third horn? Is it really that bad? “Fine, fine,” Erik mutters, turning away from her desk and stalking out the door.

He’s in the middle of the hallway on his way back to the office twenty minutes later when he feels the familiar pull of a summoning.

He looks down at the comb in his hand.

“She’s never going to let me hear the end of this,” he says before he’s flung into the vortex with a cloud of purple smoke.

-

The purple smoke clears in Charles’ workroom.

Impossibly, Magnus is even more sharp and well-dressed than last time. Charles really hadn’t thought it could happen, but here he is in a perfectly cut suit and gelled hair. Even his horns seem sharper. Charles is suddenly self-conscious about the bags under his eyelids and the traces of stubble on his cheeks. At least he isn’t covered in chalk and sweat this time.

“Good afternoon,” Charles says as he watches Magnus tuck something away into his inner coat pocket and smooth a careful hand over his hair. It isn’t fair; demons should not be allowed to look like GQ models when most magicians have trouble taking showers on a good day.

“Charles,” Magnus says. He grins widely. “It’s a pleasure already.”

Charles is completely charmed but determined not to show it. “Well then, let’s get you out of this circle and down to the business at hand.” He disintegrates the chalk circle with one sharp cut of the edge of his hand – mostly to try to look a bit cool, if he’s honest. He’ll have to clean up all the stray chalk dust later, but it was worth it.

Magnus steps out of the circle with his eyes dancing. Charles wonders if he was impressed at all. Not that it matters, of course.

The two of them head out of the room together and down the hall. Charles directs the two of them into the library, where they sit in pouf armchairs by the windows. There’s a tea tray on the side table between them, and the teapot is still steaming.

“Right. Would you like tea and biscuits?” Charles hefts the teapot and a porcelain cup. “As a precursor to lunch, of course.”

“That would be wonderful, thank you.” Magnus reclines in the chair like a king, elegantly crossing his legs and propping an elbow on an armrest.

“Milk or sugar?” Charles asks as he pours a cup.

“Just milk, if you please.”

“Right you are.” Charles hands Magnus his teacup and starts on his own. He, of course, does not skimp on the sugar.

They sip tea peacefully for a minute or two. Charles munches on a biscuit. The sunlight coming through the bay windows is warm on his face. His eyes close in contentment.

“Your library is extensive,” Magnus murmurs. “You must have been collecting for years.”

Charles blinks his eyes open.

“Oh, my family did most of the work, I’m afraid. Generations of Xavier’s have added their collections to this room. I just happen to be the lucky one who gets to read them.” Charles shrugs a bit with a self-deprecating smile. “And, every once in a while, add another book to the stacks about obscure magical theory.”

Charles finishes off his tea and makes another cup. “Well. Magnus, I suppose I’ll begin?” Magnus nods. “My availability is nearly unlimited when it comes to finding my sister, but I do have several academic and scientific commitments. I teach one class every Sunday in the morning, and I have upcoming evening labs every weekday.”

“That works well for me,” says Magnus. “Though I have quite a few more commitments.” He reaches into his coat pocket with his free hand and pulls out a schedule. He hands it to Charles.

Charles skims it. There are a good number of high-profile meetings and work activities listed there. It appears as if demons have shareholder meetings and budget cuts in their dimension, too. “Would you mind terribly if I kept this copy?” Charles asks, looking up at Magnus anxiously. “I wouldn’t want to forget one of your meetings.”

Magnus grins. “That is exactly why I brought it,” he says. “Now, find some free time in my schedule that is suitable for you. Do keep in mind that we are four hours behind you.”

“Hmm...” Charles looks it over and calculates the time differences. “Is twelve on weekdays acceptable? Starting tomorrow?”

Magnus frowns. “Then we would only have two or three hours at a time to work.”

“Yes, true. But if we worked together at a measured pace during the week and left the more tedious research to me and my magician associates in my ample spare time, it may lead to better findings overall.”

Magnus nods. “You’re absolutely right. That’s it for the weekdays, then. What would the weekends be like?”

Charles chews his lip. “I would be happy to host lunch on Saturday and Sunday, so we could discuss our finding during the week and plan on where to go from there? If that’s all right with you.”

“That sounds perfect.”

“Excellent. We’re all finished then.”

They smile at each other.

“This has been, without a doubt, the easiest scheduling meeting I have ever had,” Magnus declares.

“Let’s celebrate with lunch, then!” Charles sets his teacup down on the side table. “I had my chef prepare a special French dish – the name escapes me, which is most likely good as I consistently butcher the pronunciation.”

“Let’s.” Magnus smiles at him a moment longer. Charles feels warmer, like there are two rays of light shining on him – one from the windows, and one from Magnus. He’s hit by a sudden wave of gratitude that he decided to call Magnus’ true name in his incantation instead of any of the billions of others. God knows not all demons are as gentlemanly. Or as stunning.

The thought is still on Charles’ mind when they are in the dining hall, eating that oddly named French dish. It’s mainly because whenever Charles glances up at Magnus, it is as if he can actually see the etiquette and appeal oozing out of Magnus’ every pore. For god’s sake, he thinks to himself despairingly as he watches Magnus carefully swirl his wine, it’s not as if you are actually a model! There is no need for you to pose like a camera is about to go off!

Charles silently vows to wear something nice next time, so that he will look less like a starving artist next to Magnus.

“So, Charles,” Magnus drawls. He’s smirking. “I hear you have terrible French pronunciation, and from a trustworthy source.”

Charles can’t stop a blush from breaking high on his cheekbones. “Oh, no,” he says. “You're not going to ask me to illustrate it for you, are you?”

His smirk grows into a full-out grin. “How about the name of this dish, for starters. Bouillabaisse,” rolls off his tongue.

“Oh, bugger.” The way Magnus said it was poetry. The way he’s about to say it is just tragic, now. He sighs and bites the bullet. “Boo-ya-base.”

There is a silence. Then Magnus snorts. Which makes Charles chuckle. And then both of them are bursting with laughter.

“That,” Magnus says, “may very well be the most charming horrible accent I have ever heard. You will have to try German next.”

“Zuh-were,” Charles agrees. He wonders how many languages Magnus knows, and if he has a terrible accent in all of them. He hopes so, because this, without fail, makes Magnus unable to keep a straight face.

He still looks like a model even when his face is all scrunched up, of course. Charles deems this to be absurdly unjust.

“It’s hardly my fault that I was only taught correct pronunciation for Latin,” Charles says primly. “It’s basic principle in incantations, and it seems to have stuck.”

Magnus raises an eyebrow. “Fortunately for me,” he says, and Charles, well –

– Charles doesn’t quite know how to interpret that. Magnus seems too serious when he says it, too serious for a joke.

He ducks his head. “Well,” he tries. “I’m...”

Magnus waits for him to finish the sentence. Pointedly. Smug demons and their ridiculously attractive smirks.

Charles is flustered. He doesn’t know what to say. He’s usually much more put together than this. He’s given speeches to international leaders, damn it all. Give him magical theory over this any day – he can _feel_ his face burning in a blush.

“I’m... I’m rather fortunate, too. And... I hope that this isn’t a hardship for you. I know it...” He winces. “...Can... be? For... for most demons, anyway, due to the behavior of horribly caustic and frankly abusive magicians.”

Magnus’ mischievous smirk melts into a small, real smile that crinkles the edges of his eyes. “My dear Charles,” he says. “I assure you, working with you has been the most relaxing vacation from the company that I have ever had. Hardship, it is not.”

“Good. That’s... good.” Charles is relieved. It feels like a weight he didn’t even know he was carrying has been lifted off his shoulders.

Lunch ends, and Charles sends Magnus back to his proper dimension. It’s very amicable. Magnus thanks him for the tea, the meal, the talk, and the scheduling. Charles hardly knows what to say. It seems to work out all right anyway.

When Magnus’ leftover tendrils of smoke curl into nothing, a touch of a smile is still on Charles’ lips.

-

Hank comes over to the mansion after dinner all the way from Illinois, appearing in a neat circle of sigils on the driveway.

They shake hands in the foyer, and Hank has to push his glasses up his nose a few times from all the sweat. His eyes won’t stop flicking from side to side, and he keeps on shifting his weight back and forth.

“Hank,” Charles says kindly. “Please, there is no need to be nervous.”

“Sorry,” he says a little too fast. He takes a breath and carefully slows himself down. “Sorry, I know that, I. I’m pretty, um, nervous anyway, though. I mean, I just, I’ve always respected your work so much, you know?”

“I understand.” Charles’ eyes twinkle. “Hopefully, in time, you’ll begin to see how much of a drip I really am and feel perfectly comfortable telling me off.”

Hank grins and shakes his head. “I don’t think I’d go that far, even if you were a, uh, a drip,” he says a bit more normally. Charles considers it progress.

Charles gives him a tour of his laboratories and his state-of-the-art equipment. He also assures Hank that he has more than enough materials for any necessary magical experiments.

Then he takes Hank to his library. Hank’s mouth drops open. “Can I,” he asks tentatively, “Could I maybe, uh, read some of these? It – it might help with our project?”

Charles looks at him with a bit of sympathy. It doesn’t seem like Hank has seen much generosity. “Absolutely, Hank. Please. Any of them.”

Hank goes at the shelves like a man on a mission. Charles can’t help but stifle a chuckle at his enthusiasm.

After he’s selected four or five works to start with, Hank comes back over to Charles, smiling. Charles feels like he’s seen so much smiling, recently.

“Have everything you need?” Charles asks. Hank nods. “Then, shall we begin?”

“Absolutely,” chirps Hank.

They set up a new table in the laboratory with all of Hank’s equipment and data gatherers. There are hundreds of tools and experiments to focus on that Charles has difficulty pinning anything down specifically.

Hank seems to have the same problem. “I have thousands of hours of research...Where do you want me to start?” asks Hank.

“Could you show me what you’ve been working on recently with DNA analyzing processes, perhaps?” Charles looks down the table at the array of tools. “I’m curious about the practical applications of some of your theoreticals.”

“Right, sure,” Hank says. He brings out a case of petri dishes. “My current experiment deals with isolating unique DNA nucleotides that indicate magical genealogy.” He turns on three microscopes. “Take a look at these.”

Charles ducks his head and peers into the eyepiece. There’s a normal hair sample in the petri dish. The other two microscopes show the same thing. “What about them?”

“These hairs have all been taken from the same magical family, but from different people. Grandmother, mother, and daughter,” Hank says. He takes out a strip of test tubes. “These hairs are the original samples, and this strip holds their copies. I’ve used polymerase chain reaction to infinitely copy them, of course.”

“And then you inject anti-magic material into them to destroy and so identify its magical carrier nucleotides?” Charles guesses.

“Exactly,” Hank says, surprised. He takes out a few milliliters of liquefied aconite and inserts trace amounts into the tubes. “After I have the initial results of the normal PCR tests, it’s easy to see which ones have been nullified by the aconite.”

“An excellent idea,” muses Charles. “Which nucleotides have you found to be the main magical carriers?”

“Well,” Hank says, “It seems to be its own nucleotide.”

Charles frowns. “An undiscovered fifth nucleotide?”

“A combination,” Hank corrects. “It looks like a nucleotide that has mutated from the combination of guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine that has gone unnoticed in DNA testing. It usually tests as guanine due to its high concentration, but as I studied it further I found that it holds trace amounts of all the others, too. The exact concentration percentages of nucleotide vary by the person, and the differing amounts seem to have an impact on the types of magic the person is most naturally skilled in using. I call it panine.”

Hank takes out his records of past experiments. Papers and papers of results. Charles looks over all of them in detail. It’s extremely convincing.

Charles smiles. “An undiscovered mutation,” he says. “How marvelous. It must have slowly increased in humans for centuries until it was strong enough for people to cast spells.”

“Must have,” agrees Hank.

“And that must be the reason why some people can’t use magic at all, they aren’t a part of the mutated nucleotide line... I wonder what we would find by comparing people’s panine nucleotide concentrations... Perhaps we could create a spell that automatically pinpoints panine in a DNA test to speed up the testing process,” says Charles thoughtfully.

“We’ll definitely need to amplify the sensitivity of the chemical reactions in order to do that.”

“No doubt,” agrees Charles. “Once we isolate and control the panine, though...” Charles narrows his eyes. How could this help find Raven? “Could we use it to track down similar magical signatures? Perhaps even use it to rebuild previous states of consciousness from the original subject?”

Hank’s jaw drops open. “And here I was thinking that _I_ thought outside the box,” he says. “We’ll create the perfect spell to find your sister in no time. You’re a total genius.”

“Couldn’t have thought of any of it without you,” he says sincerely. “Now, why don’t we boot up some of this overpriced machinery to start off the biggest breakthrough in modern magical science since the discovery of molecular iron alloy anti-magic?”

-

Erik saunters back into Acidia’s office, tail whipping happily from side to side. He tosses the comb at her desk, and it melts in the acid involuntarily issuing from her mouth. He knew she would be angry about the comb.

“ _Magnus_ – ” Even her eyes are glowing. Madder than he thought.

“Acidia,” he says seriously. “I know you’re angry about the comb. But listen to me – when I ordered your new desk from the other day, I went ahead and ordered two. Your new one will be here in – ” He checks Charles’ pocket watch. “ – Less than an hour. And I’m also going to immediately put in a rush order for a jewel-encrusted ivory comb with your crest carved into it. On the house.”

The acid dissipates, her eyes flicker out, and her jaw drops. “ _Magnus_ ,” she says in an entirely different tone. “ _What_ – ”

He grins. “Might as well reward greatness in an employee,” he says. “Especially when it reaps such wonderful results.”

Acidia stares after him when he practically skips into his office. The look on her face is almost comical, as if she’s never seen a happy demon before in her life.

Well, more like she’s never seen a happy _Erik_ in her life. Erik snorts and jumps out the window. His wings unfurl and he glides with the wind, cutting through clouds and whistling some ancient tune he can’t remember the name of anymore.

It’s going to be a good day. He can feel it.


	4. Myrrh and Magma

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god check this out! Square_Pancake made a Demon!Erik manip for this story! O: http://archiveofourown.org/works/2266380 
> 
> Shocked and amazed. It inspired me so much I spat out almost 4000 words in less than a day! (Take note, readers. :D)

There are ten vials lined up in a row on the table in Charles’ workroom, all filled with delineated layers of red sand, dried bay leaves, caraway, and myrrh. Charles carefully squeezes a milliliter of diluted panine into each one. The drop hisses when it hits the myrrh.

“Right. If you would light them, Hank.”

Hank steps forward with a long taper. He dips the burning tip of the taper into the vials until it catches the myrrh on fire.

Charles stoppers the vials with corks, leaving the flames burning inside the glass. The hiss of the bay leaves is audible through the thick glass as the fire burns through the layers of ingredients. The fire slowly flickers into blue, then extinguishes as it hits the sand at the base. Blue smoke ruffles up against the glass.

Charles and Hank place the vials on the ground surrounding a circular parchment map of the world. It’s incredibly intricate, with every city in every country delicately marked down. It spans most of the workroom’s floorspace, and is especially enchanted for tracking spells with sewn-in sigils adorning its edge.

Charles draws a blue chalk circle and extra red sigils around the map and the vials while Hank goes over the incantation they scribbled down on his notepad a few hours ago. It’s been crossed out and reworded a few times, but Charles thinks the version they have now will work well if it works at all.

Charles steps back and absentmindedly rubs chalk off his hands. He looks at Hank, who seems a bit jittery. “Ready?” Charles asks.

Hank looks back, eyes wide. “I don’t know,” he says a little wildly.

Well, they have been up all night getting to this point. Charles should know better than to pull all-nighters at his age; he’s hardly in college. And Hank doesn’t seem the type to stay up late, either.

Charles puts out his hand. “Would you like it if I read the incantation, Hank? It would be no bother, if you weren’t sure.”

Hank blushes in embarrassment, but he hands over his notepad and says, “Yes, sorry, I can’t think straight and I don’t know if I would remember it properly. I have a, what do you call it, a sleep deprivation headache?”

“Completely understandable,” Charles says consolingly. “And it’s no trouble at all.”

Charles takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. The incantation scribbled on the notepad is burned onto his eyelids, and from only one glance. He must be way past the point of exhaustion. Still, he can do one little incantation.

Charles forces open his eyes and stands up straight.

“ _Ostende mihi, O rubrum harena. Haec omnia ostendunt me magicis vestigia. Lorem quid invenias ostendere mundi map. Ostende mihi_!”

The corks pop out of all ten vials, and the blue smoke and red sand issue out twined together in a double helix.

Charles and Hank watch, awestruck. Without taking his eyes off of the sight, Hank asks, “The spell is actually taking the _physical form of DNA_. Am I really seeing this or am I hallucinating from lack of sleep?”

“I could ask you the same question,” Charles says, staring. Whatever he was expecting, this spell is far more effective and elegant than he could have imagined.

The helixes splash down on the map and circle around it like snakes, covering every square centimeter of parchment. It’s searching, Charles realizes, just like he had asked it to. He wonders what will happen when it finds something.

He doesn’t have to wait long.

The helixes sweep upwards off of the map, leaving behind tiny piles of purple sand. They float back into their bottles, and the corks lift up off the floor to close them again.

Charles and Hank stare.

“Did the spell just... clean up after itself?” asks Hank.

“Yes, it did,” answers Charles faintly. “Almost as if...”

“...It was sentient,” finishes Hank.

“I don’t think the spell itself is sentient,” says Charles thoughtfully. “I think it’s the sand. I think the panine we put into the sand activated its previously unconscious magical sentience.”

Hank’s eye bulge out of his head.

“All conjecture, of course,” adds Charles hastily. “This is a fallible theory based purely on observation.”

Hank looks no less awed than before.

“Well,” Charles says past a yawn. “Let’s write all that down in our lab report later. For now, let’s just record all of the locations it gave us on the map, and then we can finally sleep.”

“All right,” Hank agrees, with a yawn of his own.

They stick marking pins into the twenty-eight sand mounds on the map, and then scribble down the coordinates. There. Done for now.

Charles smiles into his pillow as he falls asleep not ten minutes after sending Hank home.

He’s so close to finding her. It won’t be long now.

-

Erik grins as Acidia goes over every last detail of her new ivory comb over the phone to her new girlfriend. He’s sitting at his desk, half-listening to her with his door open as he reads and signs form after form on departmental budget approvals. He’s also a bit distracted from that blasted scratching sound coming from the ceiling again, but he stops hearing it after a while.

He signs off the last one with a flourish. Good. All of the work he needed to finish before he sees Charles is now done.

Erik checks his pocket watch. He has half an hour until his summons. He flips it closed, pausing when it glints in the light from outside. Charles gave this to him, and nowhere in his carefully written contract had he even mentioned its return. Charles must have given this to him as a gift.

Erik hasn’t received a gift in... a long time.

He runs the pad of his thumb over the intricate carving of a lily on its gold face. It’s beautiful. She would have loved it.

He frowns. Wait. Aren’t you supposed to give a gift in return?

He’s in Acidia’s office in a flash. Thank hell she’s ended her phone call already.

“Acidia. I need to get him a gift.”

Acidia turns toward him. “Boss?”

“Charles. I need to get Charles a gift.”

She blinks. “What? The magician?”

“I have no idea what to get him,” he says seriously. “He gave me this pocket watch. Now I need to think of something in return.”

She frowns. “Why? Aren’t you supposed to give gifts and not expect anything in return? Otherwise, what’s the point?”

He huffs a breath out of his nose. “It’s a _human_ practice, Acidia. They trade gifts. It’s just something they do.”

She shrugs. “How do you know that? Could be made up.”

He rolls his eyes. “I have thousands of years of experience in the human world, I think I’d know if it was real or not. Just, come on, Acidia, help me come up with something.”

She stares at him for a second.

“Where is Magnus and what have you done with him?” She asks.

He glares.

She laughs. “Fine, fine. What does he like?”

“Uh...” He tries to think of the times that Charles looked the happiest. “...Magic?”

“He’s a magician, Magnus, of _course_ he likes magic,” she says like she’s talking to a hundred year old demon-child.

“Yes, _but_ ,” he says, a little frustrated. “Just _doing_ magic makes him happier. And studying new ways of doing magic. And talking about magical theoreticals. Just, anything at all to do with magic.”

She looks contemplative. “Would he be interested in demon magic?”

“Absolutely,” he says firmly.

“So, make him something.”

His forehead furrows. “What should I make?”

“Well, that depends. If you want it to make you look good, just make something flashy and memorable. If you want him to actually use it, make it something practical. And, oh, I don’t know... What would a you even get for a human?”

He pauses for a moment, turning the words over in his head.

Erik nods. “I’ll think of something.”

He strides back into his office and lights a cigarette. He smokes and stares out his window in deep thought.

-

Charles wakes up with light shining in his eyes. He groans and rolls over to look at the clock.

Then he really wakes up.

“ _Eleven_?” he splutters. “Oh god, I only have an hour!” And he only really got about four hours of sleep in total. Wonderful.

He hurries into the shower, brushes his teeth, throws on some vaguely clean clothes, and rushes down to start on the Sigillum Dei chalk circle. He scribbles down it in a different spot than usual because of the massive map that’s still lying on his workroom floor.

Charles finishes just around the right time. He checks the time – done with five minutes to spare.

He rushes back to his bedroom to grab the journal and scribbles in ‘ _Good morning Magnus! Is it all right to summon you on time today?’_ as he scurries back to the workroom. Two minutes left. Perfect.

 _Of course, master_ , appears on the next line in Magnus’ elegant script. Charles wishes he could write that well. It looks like calligraphy.

_Oh, bugger, not that again! Well, in any case. See you soon!_

Charles claps his hands together, the lights flicker, he chants the incantation as quickly as he can, the chalk glows, and there is Magnus.

Charles smiles. “Hello!” He cuts open the circle.

Magnus frowns, studying his face. Charles doesn’t quite recall seeing this cross face on Magnus before. Usually he’s smiling.

“Charles, are you quite all right? You look a bit... under the weather.”

“Oh, that,” says Charles sheepishly. “I was up late all night working. Nothing to be concerned about, I’ll get right over it with a full night’s sleep.”

Magnus nods sharply. “Good.” His frown relaxes. His gaze moves past Charles to the enormous map on the floor. “What were you working on? I assume it was something to do with that.”

“Yes, exactly!” Charles’ face lights up. “This is actually something I worked on to find Raven, my sister, with my new associate magician Hank! We extracted panine from Raven’s DNA and used a completely original tracking ritual – which was actually quite a leap forward in magical science, if I may say so myself – and here we are! Over twenty different possible locations on the planet where she might be. I believe there are around... twenty-eight?”

Magnus looks a bit surprised. “Excellent. That gives me a good place to start today, at any rate. Which locations can we weed out?”

Charles double-checks the coordinates and points at the map. “That one there in New York is this mansion, so we can rule that one out. Twenty-seven left.”

Magnus nods. “Good enough.”

Charles is struck with inspiration. “Wait, before you go – ” He scurries over to his desk and pulls out a pendulum, then grabs a vial from the edge of the map. He carefully inserts the contents into the hollow channel inside the pendulum, and writes blue and red sigils in chalk on its side. They burn into the metal.

He takes a deep breath and holds up the pendulum. “ _Ostende mihi, O rubrum harena. Haec omnia ostendunt me magicis vestigia. Uti hoc pendulum ad dirige nos. Ostende mihi_!”

It swings towards the map, which is still covered in Raven’s trace amounts of panine. “It works,” says Charles breathlessly. He turns to Magnus. “This pendulum will guide you to Raven’s DNA more specifically once you’re at any of those general locations on the map.”

Magnus takes it without hesitation. Most demons wouldn’t be able to touch it because it’s made of iron, but Charles knows that Magnus is not most demons.

“Now, I suppose it’s possible that you may find people who simply have very similar panine to Raven, or that you will find only traces of DNA and not my sister. So!” Charles holds up a bag of sealed test tubes and an eyedropper. “Take the DNA you find and put it into one of these. Then bring it to me, and I’ll test it to make sure.”

He puts the small bag into a leather messenger bag and hands it to Magnus. “You can keep the pendulum in there as well, especially when you don’t want to stick out in a crowd. Oh, and here is the list of coordinates.”

“You are very prepared,” says Magnus approvingly. He tucks the list into his suit jacket pocket. “This will go much quicker. I appreciate that.”

Charles’s cheeks heat a bit at the compliment. “I appreciate you,” he blurts out in response. Oh, god. How embarrassing.

Magnus grins at him.

“Glad to know the feeling’s mutual,” he says before disappearing into a cloud of purple smoke.

-

Erik reappears three miles above the first set of coordinates with the besotted grin still on his face. Is he being a little too obvious? Maybe Charles likes obvious. Maybe he could try being more obvious... How obvious is too obvious, though? Do humans have a line that they draw? Maybe Erik could just go for the gold and propose. Is that too far, too soon? Erik wonders what Charles would look like after he popped the question. He would _definitely_ blush, and his too-blue eyes would go wide in surprise...

A bird squawks as it almost flies into him. It startles Erik out of his little daydream.

He shakes his head, pulls out the pendulum, and gets to work.

He repeats the last bit of Charles’ incantation: “ _Ostende mihi_!” It immediately comes to life and whips around to point west. He follows it, phases through a couple of walls unseen, and swabs at the DNA he finds. Simple.

Ten stops later, he has ten test tubes full of DNA that he swiped from the oddest places. Mostly magician’s workrooms, or so they appeared.

He checks his watch. It’s been an hour and a half. Surely Charles will want him to check in soon? He does have results to share.

He reappears in Charles’ workroom, carefully reappearing in the corner of the room so as to avoid stepping on the map. He walks around it and looks up –

And Charles is there at his desk, sleeping.

Erik is frozen to the floor, completely stupefied as he watches Charles’ small breaths puff through his nose and flutter the paper on his desk.

He silently takes off the messenger bag and lays it by Charles’ feet. He’ll find it easily enough; Erik doesn’t need to wake him for that. Besides, Charles needs the sleep. He said so himself.

He whispers, “I’ll be back tomorrow,” with a smile.

And he goes back to hell.

Erik appears in Acidia’s office. “Acidia,” he says. “I know what I’m going to make.”

She stops typing and looks up at him. “Done thinking already? What is it?”

He grins with all his teeth. “A ring.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Little forward of you.”

“With a protection spell on it,” he adds. “A completely platonic, efficient gift with no direct implications of romantic engagement or marriage.”

“Riiight,” says Acidia skeptically. “I’m sure nobody would see it that way, if you put an incredibly strong _protection_ spell on it. Because that couldn’t _possibly_ be romantic.”

Erik raises his eyebrows at her. “Well?”

She sighs and starts filing her long, sharp nails. “It’s fine, I guess. If you _want_ it to be romantic. _Subtly_. Maybe he won’t even notice because he’s a human.”

He nods. “Excellent. I’ll start working on it right away. Hold everything in my schedule until it’s finished. Except for Charles’ meeting tomorrow, of course.”

“Gotcha, boss.”

Erik dashes into his office and flies right out the window. He’s going to need the highest quality raw metal from one of his mines. Then he’ll smith the ring in one of his volcanoes.

Then comes the hard part. The original protective enchantment.

He does a few rolls through the clouds on his way to the mines.

This gift is going to be _perfect_.

-

Charles wakes up in a pile of papers on his workroom desk. He has an awful crick in his neck, but at least it feels like he’s had enough sleep. He looks around blearily for the clock. It’s almost seven in the evening.

His eyes pop all the way open. He’s missed Erik, and he’s got to call Hank right away. He stands up and his foot connects with – oh.

The messenger bag. He smiles and looks through it. There are ten sealed test tubes with DNA in there. Amazing. Working with a demon makes everything go so much faster. He’ll have to test this as soon as possible.

But first, he has to call Hank.

He dials in on the phone in the second floor study.

“Hello, Hank McCoy,” says Hank tiredly on the other end of the line.

“Hello, Hank!” says Charles.

“Oh! Charles!” Hank perks up quite a bit. “Hi! What’s the progress?”

“Well, I have immaculately labeled samples from ten of the locations,” says Charles proudly. “More than enough DNA to start testing.”

“Wow,” Hank says as if Christmas has come early and all of his student loans were just forgiven.

“However,” Charles continues firmly, “I think we should save another meeting until tomorrow. I can reconstruct this DNA on my own very easily and quickly, and we both need a good deal of rest tonight. If we met now I feel as if we wouldn’t be able to stop testing and theorizing until we’d solved every secret in the universe.”

Hank snorts. “Yeah. Probably. And... I am pretty tired. I haven’t been able to sleep all day because I was working on something else, so.”

“Glad we’re in agreement.”

“Yeah. See you tomorrow?”

“Yes. Tomorrow. See you then, Hank.”

Charles hangs up. He eats a stale biscuit in one of the food trays laying around before he heads back down to the workroom to start off the DNA reconstruction tests. He waits around for the results, unable to leave to go to bed without knowing.

They all come back positive. Exact matches.

It’s definitely Raven’s.

-

Erik holds up the ring to the magma, inspecting his spell’s inscription. Charles’ name is spelled correctly. Perfect.

He covers it up with another layer of specialized golden alloy, hiding his age-old secret enchantment, and finishes with another magical dose of strong shielding. He knows this is probably the strongest demonic protective spell he’s seen in quite some time, given how many shields he’s spun into the metal. He’s actually lost count.

With this, Charles will always be protected against magical attacks. Even when Erik isn’t around. Provided, of course, that he wears it.

Erik beats his leathery wings and lifts out of the bubbling magma reservoir of the volcano, bursting straight out of the crater and into the clouded sky.

He’s got to go home, sleep a bit, and freshen up before he goes to work; he might smell like volcanic ash and sulfur in front of Charles if he’s not careful.

Erik keeps the boiling metal safe in his fist. He won’t risk dropping it out of his pocket on the flight back home.

-

Charles is poring over the map in his workroom, magically refillable teacup in hand. He’s gone with peppermint tea today.

All of these completely different locations, all across the world, and all they have in common is Raven’s DNA.

There’s one in China, another in Czechoslovakia, two in Germany, two in Russia, eight in England, and thirteen in America. He can’t fathom why Raven would have been in all of these places, but he supposes it might have had more to do with her kidnappers than her actual choice.

He takes a long sip of tea after that particular thought.

He can’t wait to see the results from today’s findings. He’s already drawn up the circle a half hour in advance.

Charles watches the clock tick down until the five-minute mark. He writes in _Ready for transport?_ in the journal, and Magnus writes _Absolutely_ right back.

Charles claps his hands, puts the teacup away, and then steps up to the Sigillum Dei. He takes a deep breath, tries to stop his hands from shaking, and goes through the routine to call up Magnus from hell.

He materializes with a smile. “You look much better than yesterday,” is the first thing he says. “You humans have to take better care of yourselves.”

Charles smiles as he breaks the circle. “Thank you? I suppose?”

“You’re welcome.” Magnus goes to his pocket for something as he steps forward. “And I have something for...” He frowns, digging a bit deeper into his pocket.

Charles frowns too. “What?”

Magnus huffs a frustrated puff of smoke out of his nose. “I must have left it on the... yes, I did, I left it there in the office. Charles?” He looks up beseechingly. “Could I trouble you for a moment? I left something in hell, could I rush to get it and come back right away?”

Charles blinks. “Certainly,” he says.

Magnus smiles in relief. “Thanks. I’ll send you a line in the journal when I’ve got it.”

And he’s gone again, leaving Charles a bit befuddled.

He shrugs and starts redrawing the broken chalk circle.

-

Erik runs through Acidia’s office and into his, ignoring her surprised shout of “What are you doing back here so soon?” and going right for his desk. He vaguely hears some scratching noises, but that’s honestly at the bottom of the list of his priorities at the moment.

He rustles through the papers on his desk, but he doesn’t see the ring. He rips open all of his desk drawers and rummages through all of his office materials, but he still doesn’t see it.

“Acidia!” he calls out as he keeps on looking. “I can’t find the ring!”

“Did you check under the desk?” She calls back.

“Not there!” he yells, looking under the desk again anyway. He ignores the scratching, which has either gotten louder or just more annoying as he gets more stressed out by the second.

“On your chair?”

He turns around and – yes! There it is! It must have fallen out of his pocket when he was sitting here earlier. “Found it!”

He grabs it and rushes towards the desk, pulling out his journal from his inner pocket and scribbling down with the nearest pen _Ready for transport agai_ –

He hears a scratch that explodes into a horrifying _ripping_ noise and looks up.

There’s a glowing circle there, pushing down through the ceiling, pulsing with power and full of sigils. _Dangerous_ sigils. Erik sucks in a breath. He can’t move. He should have anticipated –

He feels a lethal pain tear through him.

Everything goes dark.

The pen drags against the journal’s page and falls to the ground.


	5. Clamor and Conflict

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait!! :( I don't like leaving cliffhangers for so long.

Charles finishes up the last sigil. He went with purple and yellow chalk this time. He thinks it’s fitting, given Magnus’ overall purple theme.

He steps back, wiping the chalk off his hands with a nearby rag.

“When I’m on my deathbed, I’ll probably be repeating the Sigillum Dei sigils over and over again like a madman,” he mutters to himself. “God knows I’ve drawn them enough.”

He flips open the journal again, checking the next line. Looks like Magnus already scribbled down his message that he’s ready for –

That’s odd.

There’s a jagged line of ink running off the page.

Charles cocks his head to the side. This doesn’t feel right.

He claps his hands together, brushing off the usual burst of power and flickering lights, and quickly runs through the incantation. The glowing chalk splashes purple and gold light across the walls.

He waits for the usual purple smoke to curl from the floor.

Nothing happens.

Did he fumble a sigil or a word in the incantation? He sweeps an eye over the Sigillum Dei sigils, but they all seem to be correct.

He narrows his eyes and claps his hands again. The burst of power brushes past him. He carefully, slowly enunciates this time, and watches the chalk light up.

A second goes by before the chalk light sputters out like a short-wick candle.

Still no smoke. Still no Magnus.

Charles frowns. The Sigillum Dei is correct, the incantation is correct, his ritual is correct.

The problem must not be on his side.

Someone else must be interfering. The Sigillum Dei is a very tightly woven summoning circle, and the spell inhibiting it must be extraordinarily powerful.

“It must have tripled wards, a sealed lockdown, and no defensive safety sigils in order to bypass the basic Dei overwrite,” Charles mutters. “And it probably wasn’t authored by a particularly well-intentioned magician, either.”

He studies the messy inkblot dragged down the journal page closely. He may only have met him a few days ago, but Charles knows one thing for certain. Magnus isn’t messy.

Charles swallows. There’s only one conclusion he can draw about this situation, really, given the evidence.

Magnus is in trouble. And lots of it.

But what can Charles even do about it, if he can’t summon Magnus here through the most powerful summoning circle in the known magical world?

Charles sets his jaw and grabs the nearest piece of chalk. If Magnus can’t come to him, then, by god, he will go to Magnus.

He dissipates his Sigillum Dei into a cloud of chalk dust with a sharp cut of his hand. He coughs and sneezes through it, dropping to his knees on the hard cement floor and scribbling frantically.

Time to skip from harebrained, scholarly magical theory right into test subject field experimentation.

Charles draws the outer lines of a Dei circle, but adds in particularly aggressive hell-banishing sigils near the center that should make his destination perfectly clear. He writes in Magnus’ last known transport coordinates in three different magical codes just to be safe, and a formulaic, automatically triggered anti-constraint once transport is complete so he can move about freely once he arrives. He adds in an ironclad return trip and a few protective force fields just to cover all of his bases.

“Right. That should do it. Theoretically.” Charles stands up. “Now for something to deal with the... climate.” He looks around the workroom for something, anything he could use as a protective talisman. He grabs a pen, empties out the ink, puts in a bit of water, a small bit of his hair, and, most importantly, air. He carefully copies down the series of symbols that he used for Magnus’ pocket watch on the length of the pen, and they glow and sink into the metal when he finishes.

There. This pen should protect him from hell’s toxic environment by surrounding him with a copy of this dimension’s atmosphere. He clips it into his shirt pocket for safekeeping.

With no other preparations to make, Charles steps into his hastily made transportation circle and claps his hands together. The hum of power and flicker of the lights means it’s working so far. That’s promising.

Charles feels a bead of cold sweat drip down the back of his neck. This has never been done before. Well, it hasn’t been done by anyone who’s lived to tell the tale, anyway.

Charles takes a deep breath.

Magnus needs his help.

He firmly incants, “ _O mysteria_ _potentior universi. Dimittite me, ut alia re, per hunc circulum. Misit me ad Inferos_.”

The chalk circle he’s standing in begins to glow white and blue, and the workroom shivers and warps around him, swirling and spinning closer and closer until it sucks him in like water eddying down a drain.

Wind whistles through his ears and his stomach swoops as if he were falling off a cliff. And yet, when he looks down at his feet, they seem perfectly grounded. He can still see the shimmering blue and white chalk circle from his workroom floor, even as he sees a squiggly, swirling void whipping past him at impossible speeds all at once for miles in every direction.

Lines of vibrating light rumble past him in slow motion, curling through the squiggly void and cocooning him into a long tunnel pointing straight downwards.

He peers down, but it’s too dark and indistinct down there. With lights all around him, it’s too bright to really see what’s waiting for him. He coasts downwards on his transportation circle until he touches down at the very end of the tunnel.

The smooth floor dips under his weight, eerily similar to the bob at the end of an elevator ride. Then the glowing circle burns into the carpeting, and the void shivers and warps until it settles into a nondescript but well-to-do office hallway.

Charles blinks and straightens up. It seems to be over. He’s in hell. Seems a bit more clean and drab than he was expecting, really.

He looks around and spots a door down the hall. He walks up to it, and the nameplate is inscribed with _Ignis Magnus Metalli_. That seems promising.

Charles turns the handle and pushes the door open.

His jaw drops.

It’s a bloody disaster. There’s papers and furniture thrown around the room, chunks of wall and ceiling missing in large gashes, and acid splatters melting through the floor. He steps inside and sees a demon with dragonfly wings crumpled on the floor beside her desk.

Charles dashes up to her and checks for a pulse – she’s alive, and it doesn’t look like she’s bleeding from her wounds. He huffs in relief. She’ll heal up soon.

He stands and turns to the next door at the other end of the room. It must be Magnus’ office.

He braces himself. Whatever is on the other side of the door will undoubtedly be disturbing. Charles turns the handle and pushes –

“Bloody hell,” he whispers.

There’s an enormous entrapment circle on the ceiling, glowing impossibly black, adorned with hundreds of punishment sigils.

Magnus is stuck in the center of it like a fly in a web, hands and feet glued to the ceiling. He’s completely immobilized, except for his flickering eyes, and there are a number of nasty wooden stakes stabbing through his body and going up into the ceiling.

Charles reads the order of the sigils carefully, looking for the break in the pattern that he can use to rip it apart.

He’s halfway through it when something crashes into him with the force of a truck.

They hit the wall – or, actually, it looks like only Charles has hit the wall. The demon is suddenly across the room, picking up a particularly scary, curved knife. It has ominous sigils carved all over it.

Charles pulls himself together. If he gets stabbed with that, there’s no doubt that he’ll die. He claps his hands together and drags out a tightly woven cord from his palm, studying his adversary.

The demon is dark blue, and zher skin is covered with lit sigils and inscriptions. Zher yellow eyes glow with intensity, but they’re unfocused. Charles doubts this demon is doing this of zher own free will.

In order to save Magnus, he has to incapacitate zher for now and break those sigils later. The only other option is killing zher, which is not an option in Charles’ mind at all.

Zhe raises the knife up and points it at Charles’ chest in a clear threat. Charles doesn’t move, just holds his cord tightly between his two hands and waits. The blue demon charges, Charles anticipates it –

And suddenly zhe is a foot away, instead of ten. Charles gasps and jerks backwards, the knife barely missing him. Teleportation. This demon can teleport with little to no effort or preparation.

Charles brings up the cord, but zhe’s already teleported across the room. He studies zher for a moment. Zhe’ll be attacking again soon, most likely at any time he shows weakness.

He’ll have to trick zher into a trap to win.

Charles pulls on the end of the cord, and it grows longer and longer. The demon’s yellow eyes flicker down at his hands then back up again. Zher tail begins to flicker back and forth in anxiousness – or is it anticipation? Charles can’t tell.

Zhe charges, and this time Charles is ready. Zhe teleports right behind him, and he quickly parries the knife with the cord before zhe retreats again. Zhe’s out of sight, for the moment; zhe could attack at any time, from any direction.

Charles lets go of the cord with one hand and claps. He drags a handful of powdered aconite out of his palm and keeps his fist tight to hide it.

Right on schedule, zhe pops up right above him and attacks. Charles throws the aconite right into zher eyes – zhe rocks back and screams in pain right before zhe retreats again. Charles figures that’ll buy him a few more seconds, more than enough time for him to set up the trap.

He grabs chalk out of his pocket and scrawls out a huge hexagon on the ground. Then a triangle, then a circle, then a bunch of sigils. It’s practically unrecognizable from his usual handwriting, but it’ll do. He stands carefully in the center circle and claps his hands to activate it.

Not a second later, the blue demon appears right above him. He whips the woven cord around the knife and zher wrist and slams zher to the side.

As soon as zhe touches down on the floor inside the hexagon, a thousand volts of electricity shoot through zher. Zhe flops to the ground, completely unconscious.

Charles breaks the hexagon trap with a sweep of his hand and hurries over to zher before zhe can wake up, and ties the cord around zher neck. That’ll keep zher under for the moment.

Now, for that bloody entrapment circle.

Charles turns to Magnus again, who is still practically writhing in agony on the ceiling despite his immobilization.

“I am sorry that this happened to you, my friend,” Charles says solemnly up to him, meeting his frantic eyes. “I’ll have you out of it soon.”

He carefully reads through all of the sigils, one by one, studying the form and pattern for the spell’s foundation.

He narrows his eyes. Found it. If he can break the elemental sigils in the four corners of the inner square, the rest of the circle will fall apart.

Charles takes out the teacup from his palm and fills it up with a very special blend of tea – one with trace amounts of iron alloy and aconite, to be exact. He tosses the tea at each of the glowing sigils, and they hiss and smoke as they go out.

It spreads through the rest of the circle until the whole thing shorts out, and finally Magnus drops to the floor, falling out of the wooden stakes. Charles rushes to catch him, and turns him over. There are horrible gashes and open wounds all over, especially from the stakes, but he’s still breathing.

Magnus’ glazed eyes catch on Charles. “Ch – ” He coughs.

“Don’t try to talk, not yet,” Charles says urgently. “I’ll get you back to the human plane right away, where you can rest up and heal. Let’s wait until then, all right, Magnus?”

Magnus shakes his head a bit from side to side. “Er – ” He sucks in a breath. “Erik.”

Charles frowns. “No, _Charles_ ,” he says as he props Magnus up and tries to get a good grip under his shoulders without jostling his wounded wings.

Magnus brings up a shaky hand to his own chest, and pats there firmly. “ _Erik_ ,” he says again, meaningfully.

Charles stops.

Magnus – no, _Erik_ , his name is Erik – Erik uses Charles’ shocked silence to scrabble to the side with his hand, looking over by his desk. Charles looks over there, following his sightline.

There’s a ring there.

“We’ll take it with us,” Charles says. “But we’ve got to get back quickly.”

Erik nods and closes his eyes, breathing harshly. Charles hoists him up and half-carries him across the room, grabbing the ring on the way to the door. He lays Magnus – Erik – down in his transportation circle. He looks for the demon with the dragonfly wings, but she’s gone. After a moment of hesitation, Charles goes back and drags the blue demon over and into the circle, too.

He claps his hands. The chalk circle glows blue and white.

The three of them disappear from the demon plane.

-

Erik wakes up in an incredibly comfortable bed. He hopes he hasn’t bloodstained the sheets.

He gingerly sits up and inspects his wounds, and they’ve healed for the most part. There’s still a few from the stakes that need a little time, but that’s all. He thanks hell for his strong demonic constitution.

He looks to the side. Charles is there in an armchair, reading.

“Hello,” Erik croaks.

Charles starts in surprise. “Hello,” he says softly, putting his book aside. “How are you feeling?”

“Alive,” Erik says with a wry grin. “Thanks to you.”

Charles smiles back with a hint of a blush. “It was no trouble.”

Erik snorts. “Fighting off a strange demon _in hell_ and breaking a powerful entrapment circle is ‘no trouble’ to you?”

Charles chuckles. “Well, when you put it like that.”

They grin at each other.

With this horribly gooey feeling suddenly taking him over, Erik has to fight off the urge to do something insane like propose. Logically, he knows that there is no actual romance started between them, and proposing is a bit hasty... But honestly, the only real reason he doesn’t is because he has no idea where the ring is.

Charles stands up, breaking the moment. “Well, I should let you get back to sleep,” he says gently. “We can talk later over lunch when you’ve completely healed.”

Erik nods and sinks back into his pillow. He watches Charles leave the room before he closes his eyes and fades into dreams.


	6. Games and Gods

Charles lays the blue demon flat out on the medical table in the lab, wrapping zher limbs with magical constraints, keeping the cord on zher neck so zhe can’t teleport when zhe wakes. Zhe should come around eventually.

He carefully documents all of the sigils that have been – shockingly – carved into zher skin with a knife. It’s a particularly complex set, winding its way through all sorts of spells. There’s altered memory charms, illusions, mind-to-mind communication enhancements, triggered punishment sigils, and, scarily enough, something that appears to be an esoteric voodoo possession veve.

Charles seems to be looking at a tortured, mind-controlled, and enslaved demon assassin. Conclusion subjective.

He has to sit down and have a cup of tea. With scotch.

Then he calls Hank.

“It’s sort of a... difficult situation to explain,” Charles says delicately. “Could you come over?”

-

Erik feels like he’s floating, high above the horizon line, riding on the wind with his wings spread out as far as they can go, sifting through clouds that are as fluffy as this mattress –

“Wait!” Erik jackknifes up in bed, suddenly intensely awake despite his natural healing coma. He needs to confirm something hugely important.

Is he in Charles’ bedroom? Sleeping on _Charles’ bed_?

He looks around furtively. There are oddly specific magical theory books on the bedside table. And there’s a teacup, half-full with – Erik sniffs it – well, Erik is sure that it’s some sort of tea. So far, all evidence points to yes.

He falls back into bed, relishing the springy bounce and the soft cotton sheets. He turns his head to the side, taking in Charles’ scent. It’s clean, somehow, like a breath of fresh air or a newly fallen rain. It’s so different from the smog and smoke that Erik’s used to. It’s... addicting. He rubs his face into the pillow. “Mmmmm...”

There’s an unfortunate ripping sound.

Erik blinks. His horn has speared right through the pillow and into the mattress. “Shit,” he swears under his breath.

He carefully gets up on his hands and untwists the horn to free himself. It’s unbearably, uncharacteristically awkward. He finally sits back with a frustrated sigh, looking at the terrible mess before him. Feathers are everywhere, and the mattress looks like it was stabbed in a gory murder. Though, that effect may also result from the enormous bloodstains Erik left on it.

It won’t do. Erik will have to replace it as soon as possible. Humans need their rest, Charles especially. He resolves to get Acidia on it right away when this whole assassination mess is straightened out.

He stiffens. Acidia – did Acidia make it? He remembers a flash of – the assassin went after her when she tried to intervene –

Erik leaps out of bed, despite a pounding headache and a few open wounds, and rushes down the hallway. It’s lovely and ornate, but Erik could not give less of a damn. He sprints down the stairs to the first level, checking the doors up ahead – no, no, no, yes!

There’s Charles’ workroom!

He slams open the metal door with a fierce push from twenty meters away and tears through it.

“Charles!” he barks –

“Hello there,” says a surprised Charles. He’s standing calmly with some other scientist, looking at various test tubes full of, well, liquids of some sort. And some papers and books and things. Magician stuff.

Erik pulls up short. “Er,” he says intelligently.

“Oh, yes, of course,” Charles says. “This is my magician associate, Mage Doctor Hank McCoy. He’s helping me with the search, as well as...” Charles’ mouth twists. “...Well, with deactivating your assassin.”

Erik doesn’t understand. He shakes his head and forcefully stills his spinning mind. “Later. You will explain this to me later. Charles, Acidia – is she – ”

“Who is Acidia?” Charles asks seriously. Erik starts to panic, but then he continues, “Is she a demon with dragonfly wings?”

“Yes, yes, that’s her,” Erik says frantically. “Is she – ”

“I don’t have absolute proof that she’s all right, but I do have something,” Charles says without forcing Erik to finish that sentence. “Here are the facts. She had a strong pulse before I went in to your office, but she had disappeared before I came back out.”

Back to her home to heal, Erik thinks. That’s all well and good, but she was traveling through hell with wounds. She could have been attacked by some random demons just because they’d smelled blood.

“I have to go check up on her,” Erik says urgently. “I have to – Charles, could you summon me back here after I’ve made sure she’s all right?”

Charles’ face softens. “Of course,” he says. “This is important.”

“Thank you,” Erik says desperately. “I’ll – the journal, yes?”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Charles says. “Go!”

Erik goes.

He’s dashing out of his office window and into the smoggy hellscape a second later. It’s not that explosive today – he won’t have to dodge any fiery flare-ups on his way to her place. That’s good.

He beats his wings as fast as he can, shooting through the sky at top speed. He has to slam a few demons trying to attack him out of his way – he has no time for these blood-sniffing hyenas right now.

Left, right, apartment complex, dodge another blood-sniffer, high-rise condo, restaurant, dodge an explosion, right, right, left, up –

There’s Acidia’s loft. He rapidly sweeps up the mountainside and up to her front door.

“Acidia!” he yells, hammering his fist on the door. “Acidia, it’s Magnus, _are you all right_?!”

No answer.

To hell with politeness.

Erik twists his fingers and all of her locks click open at once. The door swings open in front of him with a push of his chin.

It’s quiet inside. “Acidia?” Erik calls. He steps inside and heads down the hall, shutting the front door and all its locks behind him with a flick of his wrist. He looks in a few doors – kitchen, laundry room, bathroom, living room – where’s her blasted bedroom? Finally he comes to the last one. He turns the handle, pushing it open –

And sighs in relief.

Acidia is sprawled out on her bed, breathing softly. She’s halfway under the covers and halfway out. Her girlfriend has an arm slung over her, glaring daggers at him.

“You’d better be quiet and not try to start anything,” she hisses. “Or I’ll fucking kill you. And then sue you. And then tear your corpse apart.”

Erik grins. “I’m her boss, Magnus,” he whispers. “Just making sure she’s all right.”

She glares for another moment. “I’m – ”

“Kitty?” Acidia mumbles. Both of them stop and look down at her. She stirs, blinking her eyes open and looking up at him. “Magnus?”

“Kitty?” He raises an eyebrow. “Taking pet names a little literally, are we, Acidia?”

“It’s _Felis_ to you, mister,” ‘Kitty’ snaps at him.

Acidia rolls her eyes. “Quit it, both of you,” she says. She rolls over a bit and kisses Felis, who hugs her tighter. “I’m all right,” she reassures her lowly.

She looks up at Erik, smiling. “Thanks for the check-up, boss,” she says as she nuzzles closer to Felis. “But I have some very important business to attend to at the moment.”

Erik smiles back. “I’ll let you get back to it,” he says before he steps out.

As he’s flying back to the office, Erik realizes something. If Charles hadn’t come to save him, not only would he be dead... Acidia would be, too. The assassin would have left nothing to chance.

He doesn’t know quite what to do with himself, with this huge feeling rushing through him. He wants to fight off an army, tear down a volcano, build a nation – all for Charles.

Erik reaches his office, pointedly ignores the remains of the entrapment circle scarring the ceiling, and picks up his journal off the floor. He scratches in his message with the nearest pen. _Ready to come back now_.

_Excellent_ , Charles responds. _Is she doing well_?

Erik softens. _Yes_ , he writes back. _She is_.

_See you soon_.

Erik shuts the journal and slips it back into his ruined suit before he’s pulled into the void.

His purple smoke clears to the welcome sight of Charles.

“Thank you,” Erik blurts out, heartfelt. “So much.”

Charles smiles sadly. “You’re welcome,” he says quietly.

They gaze at each other for a moment. Erik feels like this silence between them is so full of words.

Suddenly, there’s a slight movement in the corner of Erik’s eye, and Erik realizes they have an audience. That young, awkward magician with the glasses is fiddling with a microscope across the room, studiously not looking at them.

Erik gives a little cough and changes tacks.

“About the assassin,” Erik says, taking a lurching, painful step forward. “Why – ”

“I told you I would explain later, but,” Charles dithers as he looks over Erik’s injuries. “I think it’ll have to wait until you rest a bit more. When we’re finished, I’ll call you straight away.”

Erik frowns. “But – ”

“You haven’t completed your healing process,” chides Charles. “Your wounds have partially reopened, and your movements are sluggish.”

Erik huffs. “But – ”

“There will be no long-winded explanations until you’re properly rested up,” Charles says firmly. “And that’s that. Go.” He shoos him off.

Erik sulks. “Fine,” he says.

He goes straight to Charles’ bed and flops down into his healing coma.

-

Five hours later, Charles is sitting cross-legged on the floor. He takes a deep breath. “Right. Are we ready over there, Hank?”

“Uh – ” There’s a crash behind him, and he’s incredibly tempted to turn around, but Charles carefully keeps himself perfectly still. There are colorful paints and chemicals adorning his face, running down his body, across the floor, and touching on the assassin’s temples. It took at least two hours to get all of it painted on; he is not messing any of it up just to check on Hank’s progress.

“Hank?”

“Just a – ” Hank is moving things around noisily. “– second. Okay. Almost there.”

“Good.” Charles closes his eyes. “Remember, this will have to be timed perfectly, or it will most likely backfire on us. Make sure you deactivate the sigils right as I reach them.”

“Absolutely.” Hank pauses. “I still feel like this isn’t safe. Usually there are more magicians around for these kinds of... psychic experiments. For medical emergencies.”

“Yes, that is true,” Charles says bluntly. “But honestly, we don’t have time for all of that bureaucracy.”

Hank is silent for a moment. “Yeah,” he says quietly. “Yeah.”

Hank flips the final switch, and there’s a humming in the air as their carefully concocted potion ignites. Charles feels magic surrounding him like a heavy fog, brushing against his painted sigils and filling them with sparking, sizzling power.

The glow runs down the lines of paint like electricity through wires, passing through Charles’ body and across the floor and right into the assassin’s temples.

It takes Charles along with it, stretching him carefully into zher mind.

It is a desolate, confusing place, to be honest. Not that Charles has actually been in a demon’s mind before, who knows, it could just be that they have completely different brain structures.

But yes, it seems like Charles is in a labyrinth of some sort, one with walls and doors and floors popping up from insane angles. He feels like he has found himself in an Escher drawing. The colors are too bright, and the walls and doors and stairs are hanging all around him at impossible, disturbing angles that are too close and so far away all at the same time. When he looks down the long, twisted hallways, the tunnels look like they stretch on forever.

He puts a careful hand to the wall and starts up (down?) the nearest stairs. His stomach lurches back and forth, like gravity’s direction is constantly shifting around him. It’s making his head spin, so he keeps a hand on the wall (floor?) to steady himself as he goes.

Everything around him is too quiet, and every step he takes is painfully sharp in his ears. It occurs to him that this demon can probably hear him, wherever zhe is hiding in this impossible maze.

“Hello?” Charles calls into the endless spaces.

That one word echoes through the hallways – _hello hello hello hello_ – and the walls surrounding him begin to vibrate with it, reeling and squirming like a serpent. There’s a rumbling noise, from a long way off.

Charles’ eyes widen. He seems to have... accidentally activated one of the defensive sigils. Maybe more than one.

The walls and floors and doors start smashing together in the distance like rocks in a landslide, closing in on him from all of his possible escape routes from miles away. It’s moving fast, even though it’s at least ten miles down those sprawling, infinite tunnels.

Charles takes off running.

“Quick, quick, think, give Hank enough time to counteract it,” Charles says to himself. He watches the faraway glass and wood and plaster smash and tumble together like a tornado as he sprints from one collapsing hallway to another, heart beating like a rabbit’s and legs burning with fatigue.

He pauses to catch his breath –

And the rolling, crushing hallways and doors slow their churning.

Charles shakes his head to clear his mind, but when he looks again, yes, it’s actually going much slower than when he was running. It’s basically stopped five miles out.

He takes one purposeful step forward, and the distant storm of wall and glass collectively lurches towards him. Interesting. The scientific soul in Charles demands for a bit more experimentation.

He does a few sprints, and yes, it speeds up again when he’s moving fast. Even when he’s simply running in place. But now that he’s stopped again, so has the oncoming destruction. Two miles away, he watches a glass window shatter as slowly as a morning glory opening its petals. It’s breathtaking.

Charles grins. “It’s an illusion making me think I’m moving through space, and that I need to keep moving to survive, when I’m _actually_ stuck in one spot. It’s a mental treadmill.”

He stays put and watches the destruction literally slow to a glacial pace around him. “How brilliant. Right. I’ll simply stay as still and calm as possible until Hank deactivates it.”

Charles lays down on the ground (ceiling?) and tries to calm down his racing thoughts despite the rolling thunder of the entire structure around him.

“Molasses,” he mutters. “Let your thoughts sink down like molasses. Go so slowly, you fall asleep.”

Charles counts his breaths, in, out, in, out. There’s so much noise and movement all around him, trying to force him to spur into action, but he forcefully relaxes all his muscles and pays attention only to the soft press of the floor to his back. Unlike the rest of the hallways and stairs that are shaking like they’re in an earthquake, it’s perfectly still.

Charles has tried meditating before, but his mind has always rushed ahead and gotten bored before he’s ever finished a session. He has always had problems shutting down his thought processes, especially before sleep.

This time is different, thank god; looks like meditation is a bit different when your life is on the line. He’s so focused that all that passes through his mind is a blissful static. He feels the smooth, cool floor (ceiling?) underneath him, holding him up, and the regular beat of his heart thrums through him. Charles may not know all of the twists and turns of this impossible maze, but he knows exactly where he is now. Right here.

Time seems to almost stop completely, and he hears the rumble of destruction rolling forward like a lazy wave instead of a blasting hurricane. It’s working.

Charles feels a spark of magic shoot through his body paint – that must be Hank deactivating the defensive sigils. It trickles through his body and soaks into the ground (ceiling?) around him.

Gradually, the tornadoes of walls and doors and stairways sound farther and farther away until there are no more sounds at all, like the receding shoreline during low tide.

Charles huffs a relieved sigh. “Thank you, Hank,” he says.

There’s the first wave of spells and sigils deactivated. Charles wonders how many there are left to go.

He opens his eyes.

And stares.

There’s an enormous map where the sky should be. It’s faded, folded parchment, written in calligraphic ink, with light illuminating it from somewhere high up above. The sight would be beautiful and mesmerizing, but –

Frankly, it’s disturbing.

There are gaping, dark holes in it, like someone savagely ripped pieces out of it. And there are horrible stains running through it, ink stains and bloodstains both.

“If the labyrinth was an illusion designed to incite fear and confusion...” Charles says with a furrowed brow, running through the list of spells they’d decoded on zher. “This must be...”

He studies the map, where the tears and rips are, what the stains are covering up. It looks like most of the gaps correspond to large landmasses on Earth, and the stains mostly obscure calligraphic text. All in all, it seems the point of it is to destroy information.

“An altered memory charm,” Charles breathes.

The magician who did this must have ripped chunks of the demon’s location memory out of zher mind like a monster. No doubt to tether and control zher teleportation gift. It’s staggeringly awful. Charles is more and more horrified the deeper he goes into this poor demon’s mind.

He bites his lip. How can he fix it? Charles knows very well that memory alterations aren’t permanent in most cases. The memories are usually just hidden somewhere else in the mind. They must be around here somewhere.

He looks around and – to his surprise – sees an endless expanse of paper littered on the ground. Crumpled, burned, stained, torn up into small bits, thrown around. It’s as if he’s wading in a lake of discarded paper.

He bends down and picks up a piece. “Fre,” he reads. “Dy,” reads another. “Hen.” “X.” “Youn.”

Charles thinks he understands. All of the removed location memories from the map have been split into meaningless syllables and shapes and tossed aside.

“Well,” he says. “It’s a very good thing that I am so devoted to cleanliness and reformation of broken equipment, despite my incredible laziness. Otherwise this would have taken hundreds of years to sort through.” He clears a space on the floor of paper and carefully etches out his organization spell with a fingernail. Grid here, marking sigils there, mathematical formulae here...

“Right,” he says, pressing both palms into the activation sigils. He hopes this works in the mind as well as it does in the physical world. “ _O_ _fragmentorum ex puzzle, solvere vos. Chartis, coniungere cum laceratus oras. Invenias pares_.”

The sigils shimmer bright purple as they burn into the white, smooth floor. Charles is relieved to see it.

There’s a flutter of wind, and the papers covering the ground fly up like snowflakes, all whisking around him.

He watches them dance together, knocking into each other to see if their edges match. Every once in awhile, he sees a purple spark and presto! Two more pieces meld back together.

There are thousands, if not millions, of pieces left to go. Charles sits back and watches as more and more purple sparks ignite.

It’s like seeing fireworks in a snowstorm, and he can’t take his eyes off it.

Bigger and bigger bits of paper are starting to weave back together. It goes faster exponentially – once the smallest pieces have been fit together, it’s much easier for the larger pieces to find the right edges quickly and efficiently. Charles thinks they may even somehow be communicating with each other, if they have any traces of sentience in the demon’s mind.

Charles is starting to recognize geographical locations and city names on some of the larger pieces. There’s a few recognizable strips of the East Asian steppes, the Nile threading through Egypt, and a clearly written ‘Denver, Colorado’.

Finally, the last papers knit themselves together and lay flat on the floor. The purple shimmer goes out in the sigils as the spell ends.

“Excellent,” Charles says. “Now, on how to reconnect these memories with the rest of the map...” He looks up at the ceiling-map, with its awful stains and holes and burns.

“Something tells me these were ripped off and locked with carved sigils instead of psychic influence,” he muses. “So Hank will need to deactivate them before I can fix the whole map.”

For Hank to do that, Charles will need to activate the defensive mechanisms on these altered memory sigils. But how? The illusion’s sigils were set off by the sound of his voice... Charles thinks hard, trying to remember the order of the memory charm sigils. Mold, set, split...

“Perhaps if I touch the map?” Charles guesses.

It may think he’s trying to edit it without the original spellcaster’s permission. He shrugs. It couldn’t hurt to try. Charles claps his hands and digs around inside his palm-pocket. What could he toss up there...

Aha.

He pulls out a small, stone amulet. It’s very old. Charles’ great-grandfather obtained it over a hundred years ago. It’s definitely magical enough to get on the map’s radar, and probably powerful enough to survive whatever punishment the sigils send out after it.

Charles tosses it upwards on a puff of controlled air. It coasts up there easily.

The amulet barely touches the surface of the map when it sets off the alarms.

A ripple rolls through the map before it springs into action, wrapping itself around the amulet like a boa constrictor. It squeezes tighter and tighter until the entire map is pressed into a ball.

“Glad that isn’t me,” remarks Charles.

He feels another spark of magic flow through his body paint and into the atmosphere – no doubt from Hank, deactivating the sigils. He watches the map slowly unfurl.

The stone amulet drops to the ground with a click. He picks it up and slips it back in his palm.

The map shakes out all of its folds and creases, stains and tears. It sweeps down to the ground, scooping up its missing pieces in one smooth movement, before rising back up to the ceiling.

Charles looks over the remade map. It’s a pristine rendition of their entire planet, and it’s absolutely beautiful.

He smiles.

“Another sigil group down,” Charles says. He’s ready for the –

He blinks, and suddenly he’s in a thicket of sharp, thorny vines.

– next one.

“Well,” he says in surprise. “That was sudden.”

Charles thinks it’s safe to say that this must be the punishment spell, keeping the assassin’s consciousness trapped with the voodoo veve.

He doesn’t dare to move yet; the thorns could easily cut or puncture him if he shifted a millimeter in the wrong direction. Who knows what could be hidden in those thorns; he’s not taking a single chance with these twisted, gnarly vines. It occurs to him that movement is most likely the trigger, based on the sigils he remembers.

“So, the question is... How do I trigger the defensive sigils without letting them kill me instantly,” Charles says thoughtfully. “If movement is indeed the trigger...”

Then he needs to facilitate movement in the thicket, at _least_ ten meters away from himself, without moving anything but his eyes and his mouth. Hm.

“Let’s see...” he says. He runs through a list of possible spells. He has some options. Some better than others. Actually, one in particular looks promising. If it even works in here. Perhaps the electricity from nearby neurons will answer his call.

Charles takes a deep breath. Here goes nothing. He hopes he isn’t too close to the heart of the thicket; he may get roasted if it actually is successful.

“ _Vocans_ _fulmine! Percute, in huius densitate spinosi! O fulmine irati! Percute_!”

A bolt of lightning crashes down with an explosion of thunder, roasting a square acre of thicket in the distance. Charles can see smoke rising and flames spreading. That should be sufficient, right? A good smiting? He holds his breath, waiting for the thicket to react.

Sure enough, over at ground zero, he can see angry ripples of vines slashing and ripping apart whatever is on fire.

He feels Hank’s deactivation spell pulse through his face paint and through the soles of his feet, straight into the roots of the thicket. The vines around him shiver and blacken, collapsing into dead clumps around him. He takes careful steps towards ground zero, every touch of his foot sending out another pulse of magical weed-killer.

Soon enough, the thicket is just a field of flat, black vines scattered across the ground. It’s relatively easy to walk through now.

He finally reaches the smoking crater. The ‘heart’ of the thicket, right where the lightning struck.

He peers over the edge. Charles can see flickers of flame darting around inside it, burning any vines left to dust and ashes. It’s completely blackened.

Except...

Charles frowns. There’s something at the very center of the crater. Something gleaming underneath the vines and ashes.

He slides down the curve of the crater wall, and clears the mess of vines and roots and ash off of... whatever it is... with a swipe of his hand.

It’s silver and reflective, like a dirty mirror. When he taps it, it sounds hollow. And deep. He clears more off the sides, revealing more of it. It’s almost as large as a coffin.

Charles’ eyes widen.

A coffin. A _sealed coffin_.

This must be where the demon’s consciousness is locked away with the voodoo veve.

Charles studies the sheer silver surface of the coffin’s top. There are no indentations, carvings, or handles at all. It’s clearly supposed to be impenetrable. And it wasn’t damaged when it got hit by lightning, either. So how is he going to pry it open?

He runs an idle finger over the silver. Maybe if he destroyed the molecular makeup of the element itself? But it’s only a mental projection, it’s not really there...

Charles jerks back in surprise. There’s a pattern forming on the coffin’s surface, right where he’d just touched it. Something... checkered? Maybe he can flesh it out a bit more, and try to figure out what it is. He scrubs both palms over it – silver and white checkers blossom in front of him, covering almost the whole surface.

“Checkers...” Charles mutters. “Is it a game board? A patterned password?”

He doesn’t have to wait for long. Out of the thick metal of the coffin and right into the checkered boxes rise elegant silver and white chess pieces.

There are only five pieces on the board, carefully placed in a brutal endgame.

“So the password is a _chess move_ ,” breathes Charles. “And I have one chance to win.”

He studies the board. His king is safe and removed, and he has a rook and a bishop left. The enemy is hiding behind a pawn on the back corner of the board.

Easy pickings.

Charles pushes his rook over five spaces, right up against the edge of the board for check. The king is penned in the corner from his pawn, and the bishop is blocking off his only exit.

And checkmate.

Charles grins as the chessboard swings open, revealing the assassin’s supine body. That wasn’t hard at all. He’s not a chess master by any means, but he’s guessing that this magician isn’t much of one either.

He takes a closer look at zher body. It’s tied up in complicated knots, and on zher forehead is the veve of the Lwa named Kalfu, written in blood, gunpowder, and rum.

“Lwa of evil, destruction, misfortune, injustice, and black magic,” says Charles tiredly. “Whoever did this...” He shakes his head.

He reaches out to zher blue forehead, to break the veve and release zher once and for all.

A black cane crosses in front his hand.

“Now, now,” a deep, amused voice says in a thick Louisianan accent. “Don’t be so hasty to break what ain’t yours, little boy.”

Charles whips his head up.

A smiling man – demon? – is there, wearing all black. His skin is a dark, dark red, and his eyes shine white like the moon.

“Kalfu,” breathes Charles.

“The one and only,” he says with a smirk.

_Does he ever stop smiling?_ Charles wonders. It doesn’t matter, it isn’t relevant. Even though it’s setting Charles on edge, making every hair on his neck stand on end.

“I,” Charles forces out past the terror closing up his throat. “I need to free zher.”

Kalfu cocks his head to the side, grinning, always grinning. “What, this blue little thing? Now, why would you need to go and do a thing like that, little boy?”

Charles feels like he’s standing before his mother at three years old. He hasn’t felt this terrified in a long time, and it’s as if his mind has gone blank with panic. “Zhe’s,” he says desperately. He knows he has to save this demon, he _knows_ it, but where did the answer go –

Kalfu moves fast and fluid, like a shadow, and in a split second he’s right in Charles’ face, looking deep into his eyes. Charles’ mind shorts out.

“I see you, little boy,” he laughs. “Oh, this smart little boy! He’s sure a sweet little thing.” He taps his cane on his sharp, bony knee as he belts out laughter.

Charles is frozen with fear.

“Little magic boy,” he croons, almost like he’s singing it. “Little magic boy, I see you! Come out, come out, come out to play!” He pulls a leaf from his front suit pocket, where he was wearing it like a pocket square, and blows it right into Charles’ forehead.

Charles blinks. He’s suddenly perfectly mobile. All his fear seemed to have just fallen away, and his surroundings seem sharper, somehow.

“There we are,” Kalfu hums, satisfied. “Now, my little magic boy, tell me. Tell me why you hafta save this little blue thing over here, hm?” He casually taps the assassin’s blue chest with his cane.

Charles sucks in a fortifying breath. It helps a bit, actually.

“This demon,” he says. “Zhe’s... Some magician’s brainwashed zher, tortured zher, and I need to free zher. Someone _needs_ to save zher.” He looks up at Kalfu beseechingly. “Please,” he pleads brokenly. “Please let me save zher, _please_.”

Kalfu grins. He has a lot of teeth, Charles notices. “Well now,” he purrs. “Goin’ up against a crossroads Lwa to save a complete stranger, my little magic boy? Someone who ain’t even your species, like.”

Charles nervously twists his hands together. Waiting.

Kalfu leans in close to Charles again, quick as a cobra. His eyes narrow, pinning Charles in place, and his smile –

– his smile disappears.

“Let’s talk a mo’, _serious_ -like,” Kalfu says. His voice rumbles through Charles like an earthquake, and his eyes bore into Charles’ like he can see right through him into his soul. “Now, I pride myself on a lotta things you’d not much like, but I reckon there’s a few you would. One of them’s my mastery of the human condition, see?”

He waits for some kind of answer. Charles nods.

“Now, my little magic boy, do I gotta little piece for you,” he says, patting Charles’ shoulder in a weirdly fatherly way. “You gotta sliver of somethin’ in your soul, right here – ” He jabs at Charles’ chest. “ – and it’s the only bit of you that ain’t bright and clear. It’s gonna get darker if I don’t say nothing, so here’s the piece.”

Kalfu considers him for a second. “You ain’t ready to hear it, but it’s true as the moon sittin’ behind the clouds.” He bends in real close, right up to Charles’ ear, and whispers, “The star ain’t shinin’, don’t have no fire, the shadow ain’t castin’, don’t have no soul. But the little magic boy, the one who ain’t a quarter three, don’t have no sister, mother, nor no bitter foe, ‘cept the dark little one clawin’ on him, draggin’ him down to depths damned low.”

Charles shudders. He has no idea what it means, but even so, the words fill him with dread.

“Them words don’t make no sense yet, I see it in your scrunched up little face,” Kalfu laughs. “But listen here – they will. You’ll see. And Charles?” he asks breezily.

“Yes?”

“I like you, little magic boy, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t much like bein’ trapped in that there box with this sweet little blue thing in the first place,” he says with a wide, wide grin. “So’s I’m gonna do you a favor, here, and I ain’t gonna make a fuss. It ain’t my style t’ ride a little Cheval for so long, anyhow, and I got other business to be doin’ somewhere else, see?”

Charles hopes he’s saying what he thinks he’s saying.

“That’s right, little boy!” He laughs loudly. “I’m a-leavin’ this poor soul. Sacrifice me a bull or two when you’re outta here, it’ll be a right fun time.”

He spins his cane with his bony fingers, and he’s gone.

Charles looks down at the assassin – Kalfu’s veve has completely vanished off of zher forehead, right along with him.

He sinks to the ground in relief, heart beating frantically. He’s still alive, thank god. Well, thank Kalfu, apparently.

A belated pulse of magic from Hank suddenly flows through Charles and into the coffin, ripping all of the magical restraints off poor old blue. He assumes Kalfu was blocking Hank’s spell until he left.

Charles shuffles over to zher on his knees and checks for a pulse. There is one, but it’s weak and slow. Zhe’s in a coma left over from the possession, it seems, even though it should technically have dispersed along with the restraints.

What if zhe doesn’t wake up? What if zhe doesn’t want to? Zhe’s been through so much trauma, physically and mentally.

“Please, please, wake up,” he begs, cupping zher face with a shaking hand. “You deserve a happy life after this, please wake up.”

No response. He holds his breath, praying.

Zhe stirs, opening zher yellow eyes.

Oh, thank god. Charles lets out a relieved breath.

“Hello there,” says Charles with bravado, despite being completely exhausted.

Zher confused eyes flick towards him. He smiles disarmingly. 

“I’m Charles Xavier. And you are?”


	7. Worries and Wounds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNINGS: Extreme emotional distress. Vague descriptions of extreme torture, violence, and gore. Also, cussing, but that's not as big a deal in my opinion. If there are any others I missed that I should put here please let me know. 
> 
> This chapter was a bitch to write, even though the only things that happen in it are long conversations. Mostly because of all the intense emotional stuff going on. Be warned. I suggest that you eat some ice cream and listen to your favorite song after reading.

Erik is lying in bed, staring up at the vaulted ceiling of Charles’ bedroom with half-lidded eyes.

Even though his healing coma is over, he doesn’t want to move. The blankets are so warm and soft, and it smells so nice. Erik wonders if Charles smells this way naturally or if he uses some sort of magic cologne.

He snuggles into his pillow and hopes for a few more minutes of this. It’s paradise. He never wants to leave.

There’s a tentative knock on the door.

Erik groans, rolling over and dropping his face right into the center of the pillow. Maybe if he doesn’t respond, the knock will just go away.

Another knock. Louder this time.

So much for that particular strategy.

“Five more minutes,” Erik says petulantly. He’s vaguely aware that his voice is muffled by fluffy down, but he doesn't care.

There’s a pause outside.

“Hello? Mister... Demon? Sir? You in there?” a reedy voice says.

Erik lifts his head. It’s the awkward magician from the workroom, with the glasses and the microscopes. Damn. Erik can’t remember his name.

“Hello, er, Charles’ fellow magician – associate – colleague,” Erik tries valiantly. “Mr. Demon speaking.”

“Right, uh,” Charles’ fellow magician-associate-colleague laughs nervously. “I’m Hank McCoy, we met earlier?”

“Hank, yes, that’s it,” Erik mutters to himself. He figures he might as well introduce himself again, too. Being referred to as ‘Mr. Demon’ when you’ve led armies and built nations is a bit disconcerting. “Hello, Hank. My full demonic title is Ignis Magnus Metalli. As you are an associate of Charles, however, you may call me Magnus.”

“Oh, uh, thanks.” Hank seems to awkwardly shuffle outside the door, judging on the sound of shoes scuffing the wooden floor. “Mr. Magnus, Charles sent me up here to call you down to the workroom. We just finished deactivating all your assassin’s spells, so.”

Erik hums. Having another magician ask him to do something is a bit odd. “Why didn’t Charles come and get me himself?”

“He’s... fine,” Hank says carefully. That gets Erik’s full attention. “Nothing permanent, but, you see, he’s a little, uh, incapacitated at the moment – ”

Erik shoots out of bed and rockets out the door, flying past Hank in a purple blur. He’s down in the workroom ten seconds later.

“Charles!” he exclaims, darting up to where Charles is collapsed on the floor covered in colorful sigils and grabbing his shoulders. “Are you all right?”

Charles is panting heavily and his eyes are tightly closed, but his mouth curls up into a faint smile at the sound of his voice. “I’ll be fine,” he says hoarsely. “I just... need a second. Is zhe...?”

Erik looks up and sees the assassin, lying in a carefully constructed chalk circle a meter away from Charles, opening zher eyes.

The same assassin that tried to kill him in his own office.

The same assassin that knifed Acidia.

The same assassin that just _hurt_ _Charles_.

“You blood-sniffing bastard,” Erik snarls, unsheathing his sharpest claws as he rises to his feet. The air around him crackles with sparks as he roars, “I’m going to _rip your_ _fucking throat out_!”

Zhe swings zher head in his direction, clouded yellow eyes widening in terror.

Erik takes deliberate, measured steps towards his target with bloodlust in his fiery eyes and rage in his shaking claws.

Zhe scrabbles at the floor with zher weak limbs, desperately trying to get away. Erik can almost taste zher fear as he closes in.

“I’m going to enjoy killing you,” Erik breathes out in a haze of smoke and flame. He wraps a hand over zher neck like a vise, relishing zher petrified face. “And it will not be over quickly.”

“Erik,” a quiet, shaky voice pleads. “Stop.”

Erik doesn’t really hear it over the din in his head. He raises his claws, preparing to stab his sharp claws right through zher and into the floor again and again and again –

“Erik,” Charles cries with a sob. “Stop! Please! _Erik_!”

The last shout finally cuts through the noise and zings straight into his mind.

Erik freezes.

He looks over his shoulder at Charles, claws still hanging in midair.

“Charles?” he asks, bewildered.

“Don’t,” Charles pleads. “Don’t... Erik... Zhe’s... It wasn’t zher fault, someone was controlling zher, please...”

Erik blinks. “Wait, Charles, did you just call me _Erik_?” he asks, completely thrown off by this new development.

“Um, yes?” His blue eyes flick back to the demon Erik was about to annihilate. “Erik, zhe was a pawn, zhe doesn’t deserve to die – ”

“But – Charles – you called me by my _intimate_ _name_!” Erik stares at him, baffled. “When did I – that’s – ”

He shakes his head, trying to clear it of confusion. Damn it all, when did he try to propose? He can’t remember it at all. Maybe it was after Charles saved him when he was wounded and delirious?

But more importantly, did Charles say yes or no?

“Erik,” Charles says exasperatedly. “Please, can we focus on the matter at hand for a moment, now is _not_ the time for this conversation.”

Erik clears his throat and tries to compose himself. “Yes, of course, I’m terribly sorry,” he says courteously. “Please continue. You were saying?”

Charles heaves a long-suffering sigh while scrubbing his face with a palm, as most humans tend to do when they’re distressed. Erik thinks it might have something to do with blood pressure or something, but he’s never actually asked. It had never really seemed polite.

“Zhe was being controlled by a powerful magician,” Charles finally says in the aggravated tone a professor would use with a particularly irritating student. “So _don’t. Kill. Zher_.”

Erik blinks. “Oh,” he says, looking between his raised claws and the trembling assassin he’s gripping by the neck. “ _Oh_. A puppet. Right.”

There’s an uncomfortable silence.

“Well then. This is embarrassing.” Erik retracts his claws back into fingernails and stretches his hand out for a handshake.

“My apologies,” Eriks says politely. “Why don’t we start over? Hello, I am Ignis Magnus Metalli.”

The assassin stares at him in utter astonishment. Erik carefully keeps his face neutral and non-threatening.

Zhe darts a questioning look at Charles, who nods.

“I,” Zhe stammers nervously. Zhe takes a deep breath before tentatively reaching out to take his hand. “I am Unit Designation 0533F, Codename Vispilio.”

Erik frowns. “Unit...?”

Instinctively, he snatches zher forearm and turns it over. There, carved in deep cuts, he can clearly read a designation.

Erik’s face hardens.

A prisoner. Or an experiment. Or both.

“Who did this to you,” he snarls.

Vispilio doesn’t respond, just looks at him with wide eyes.

His grip on zher arm tightens, hard enough to bruise.

“ _Who. Did this_.” He grinds out.

A small, scared noise escapes from the back of zher throat.

“Erik,” Charles says firmly. “Please. I’ve spoken to zher already. Let zher be for now.”

He steps up behind Erik and lays a kind hand over his tight grip.

“ _Erik_.”

Vispilio’s terrified eyes flicker over Erik’s face, desperately searching for survival. Erik abruptly notices they’re a deep, molten gold color flecked with black speckles. How striking.

Erik sucks in a shocked breath. And how _childlike_. Vispilio can’t be more than a fifty-year-old demon-child, not with that amount of speckles ringing around zher pupils. Zhe’s practically a newborn.

Charles is right.

He peels his fingers off of Vispilio’s forearm one by one before stepping back.

“Thank you,” Charles says softly. His hand is still resting on top of Erik’s. It’s comforting.

Erik can’t look him in the eye.

“Charles, I’m not – I need to leave, I have to get everything under control, I’m.” One push away from a mindless berserker massacre, he can’t make himself say.

“I understand,” Charles says gently. He unconsciously rubs the pad of his thumb over Erik’s white knuckles. “Let me know when you’re all right.”

“I will.”

Erik reluctantly breaks his hand away from Charles and sinks through the floor. He rises up into a deep Russian forest on the other side of the world. He needs to tear something apart.

Like that nearby mountain range, for instance.

-

Charles rubs at his temples, trying to shake off his horrible headache. He must have gotten it from the psychic journey he took through Vispilio’s mind; he’s still caught up in a whirlwind of confusing thoughts and contradicting emotions.

Sighing, he slumps down on the floor next to Vispilio.

“Sorry about all that,” Charles says apologetically. “I didn’t have a chance to talk to him beforehand to explain things.”

Zhe looks at him with a bit of a smile.

“It’s all right,” Vispilio says. Zher voice is measured and lilting. It’s very calming, just like zher cleared mind had been. “I understand. He was just trying to protect his loved ones.”

Charles smiles back. “You are truly remarkable.” His smile dims a bit. “It’s astonishing how kind you are, especially given how much you’ve suffered.”

Vispilio looks at him inquisitively, cocking zher head to the side. Charles can almost see zher collecting zher thoughts, no doubt sorting through memories nobody would ever want to recall. Zhe’s also studying Charles with old eyes – too old for zher age.

Then zher golden eyes twinkle, and zhe says something Charles will never forget.

“Suffering does not kill kindness, Charles Xavier,” Vispilio murmurs with the quiet conviction of experience. “If anything, it makes kindness thrive.”

Charles stares at zher. Zhe keeps surprising him.

He feels close to bursting, with a bubble of mounting admiration expanding in his chest. His throat starts to close up with emotion. He hopes he doesn’t suddenly burst into tears, but he seems to be losing that battle.

“You are, without a doubt, astounding,” he says a bit hoarsely.

Zhe beams at him.

“You see?” zhe says warmly. “Look at the both of us.”

Charles laughs brokenly. Then he gives Vispilio a weak, watery smile. He can’t stop a tear or two from escaping. “Yes,” he replies, quickly wiping off his cheeks. “I see.”

“Good,” zhe says sincerely.

They sit together for a moment, a hush falling over them. They watch dust motes dance in the light like fireflies.

Charles somehow feels more at peace than he has in a long time.

Then the silence is broken by the abrupt squeak of the door handle and the creak of its hinges. Charles reluctantly turns his head in that direction. He irrationally feels like he’s being interrupted in the middle of something important, even though he’s just sitting silently in one spot, breathing.

Hank walks through in the opened door, casual as can be, with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand.

“Hey, Charles,” he says nonchalantly. He takes a sip of coffee and sits on the edge of the drafting table. “I told Mr. Magnus to come down to the workroom, but then he just flew off. No clue where he went. Kind of a strange guy. Anyway. What did I miss?”

-

Erik finishes razing the last of the mountain range to the ground in one fell swoop. It’s very satisfying. All the traces of berserker rage are finally gone.

He settles on the top of a fir tree, gazing at the flattened plains around him. There’s not a mountain in sight. Erik grins. He wonders how the magicians are going to try to explain this one to the press.

Erik lights a cigarette with his thumb and blows smoke rings. He closes his eyes and reclines like a cat, reflexively winding his tail around the branch underneath him.

What a day.

Well, nobody died, at least. And Charles isn’t mad at him. Probably.

Of course, he’ll have to get a new suit immediately. This one is completely ruined. There are huge punctures where the stakes went through him, and blood has stained almost every last inch of it. Can’t go back to Westchester looking like a horror film.

And he should probably give Acidia a raise when he gets back to hell. She definitely deserves it. It’s not every day when your secretary tries to fight off your assassin to save your life, after all.

Most importantly, when he gets back to Westchester, Charles and Erik need to have a _conversation_ about intimate names.

Getting uncontrollable tremors running up his spine from hearing his _intimate name_ come out of Charles’ mouth during a serious situation was incredibly distracting. And for fuck’s sake, Charles was calling him Erik _repeatedly_ in front of _Vispilio_! How mortifying. There is such a thing as privacy, you know.

Erik shakes his head and stubs out his cigarette on his tongue with a sigh.

Charles is worried about him. It would be best to get back soon. Can’t keep him waiting when he’s concerned about Erik, of all people. That would be awfully inconsiderate.

Erik blasts out of the fir tree and into the sky with a single beat of his wings.

-

Charles sets down bowls of food and milk on the kitchen floor. The cat rubs herself against his leg and meows in thanks. He kneels down to pet her and she purrs contentedly. He wishes it was that easy to take care of everyone else.

Teaching Vispilio how to wear clothes and eat properly at the table with Hank and himself had been a challenge. Zhe kept on accidentally ripping the fabrics with zher claws, and then zhe couldn’t sit in a chair at the table for a full minute without flinching at every sudden movement and crawling under the table in fear.

Charles gets the feeling that zhe was treated more like a pet than a person. An abused pet, at that.

It makes Charles pick up the cat and squeeze her to his chest in a sudden hug.

“I love you,” he says into her beautiful orange fur. He remembers when it was matted and coarse, when she first limped up to him. Now her fur is clean and soft, and she never hisses or bares her teeth anymore.

She squawks and squirms in protest, trying to get back to her bowl. Charles holds on for another second before relenting and letting her back down.

“Sorry, Mico,” he soothes. She harrumphs at him and returns to her meal.

He smiles down at her.

Taking care of her is the one thing in life he hasn’t messed up yet.

Give it time, he thinks dryly to himself. He stands and goes up to the kitchen’s bay windows. He sits on the dais and watches the sun begin to set, absently picking at a loose thread in his blue sweater.

He wonders for the hundredth time where Erik went, and if he’s all right.

He doesn’t wonder long.

“Charles,” Erik says from right behind him.

“Erik!” Charles spins around, heart hammering in his chest. “You’re back.” And in a stylish new suit, too.

He doesn’t have much time to appreciate it, though – Mico screeches and launches herself at the intruder’s legs in a vicious attack.

Erik catches her one-handed and holds her up in the air, where she swings her claws at him in vain. Erik raises an eyebrow. “Quite the little demon you have here, Charles,” he says.

Charles grins. “Her name is Mico.”

“Very fitting,” Erik says, amused. “My apologies for interrupting your meal, Madame Mico.”

He sets her back on the floor. She glares at him with intense hatred. Then she turns back to her food and completely ignores the both of them.

Charles shakes his head to hide a smile.

“Would you like something to eat, Erik?” he asks. “Or something to drink? You must be starving after everything that happened today.”

“Certainly.”

Charles putters around the kitchen as Erik takes a seat at the kitchen table, watching him. He throws together salmon and cream cheese sandwiches alongside a squash soup. It’s one of the few meals he can make on his own.

Erik devours his soup and sandwich. It’s actually quite impressive. Charles has never seen someone eat a meal that quickly before.

Then Erik sits back in his chair and crosses his legs, looking awfully regal and serious. “Charles, I have a matter of some importance to discuss with you,” Erik announces.

Charles takes another bite of his sandwich. “All right,” he says peaceably through cream cheese and salmon. “What is it?”

Erik clears his throat. “Well,” he says a bit uncomfortably. “The topic is a bit personal.”

Charles chews on that. And on his sandwich. “Right, okay.”

“It’s, er,” Erik says, looking somewhere over Charles’ shoulder. “About your usage of my, ah, intimate name.”

“Oh,” Charles says mildly. “I’m sorry. If you don’t want me to use it, I’ll call you Magnus like I did before. Not to worry.”

Erik seems to have developed purple splotches on his high cheekbones. “That’s not – ” he stammers. “I didn’t mean for you to stop calling me that entirely, I only meant – ”

Charles frowns. “What did you mean, then?”

Erik’s face has gone almost completely purple. “I would like very much for you to call me Erik,” he forces out like it’s being tortured out of him. He looks up at the ceiling in absolute mortification. “Only... not in public, just when we’re alone.”

Charles’ eyebrows shoot up. “Oh,” he says in an entirely different tone than before. He has sudden recollections of every single time he’d said ‘Erik’ in front of Vispilio. “ _Oh_ ,” he says again, suddenly as mortified as Erik.

Erik is still staring staunchly at the ceiling. It looks like his ears have gone bright purple, too.

“Oh, god,” Charles breathes. “I’m so sorry, I had no idea that I was being so tactless – ”

“It’s all right,” Erik mutters to the wall. “I should have told you – ”

“Christ, I should have thought to ask you if it was all right before I just started using it, that was completely culturally ignorant and insensitive of me – ”

“Charles, it’s fine,” interrupts Erik. “Just – in the future, could you maybe just – ”

“Yes, of course, of course, never in public, only when it’s just us two.” He’d never thought he’d commit such an incredible faux pas. Charles’ face is practically burning with embarrassment. Now they’re both looking at the wall.

Erik almost visibly changes the subject before he even opens his mouth.

“Now that that’s straightened out,” Erik says with a forced nonchalance. “Er, yes, how is that Vispilio demon-child?”

It’s a big jump in conversation, so it takes a moment for Charles to readjust from extreme embarrassment to business.

“Oh, zhe’s doing exceptionally well, under the circumstances,” Charles says, still a bit off-put. “Honestly, it’s amazing how well-adjusted zhe is, given what zhe went through.”

“You said that you’d already spoken with Vispilio at length, correct?”

“I did.” Charles works on his squash soup. “Before I broke the psychic connection, so it would be easier on zher to explain certain things. I assume you would like to know zher story?”

Erik nods.

Charles puts his spoon down on the table, even though half his soup is still sitting in his bowl.

“It’s a difficult story to tell,” Charles confesses.

“I understand,” Erik says. “Take your time.”

Charles steels himself, running a hand through his hair. Erik needs to know this.

It’s quiet in the kitchen. The only sounds are Moci lapping up her milk and the beginnings of a gentle summer rain tapping on the window.

“Vispilio wasn’t born,” he says at last. “Zhe was _grown_.

“Zhe was made in a lab, only ten or twenty years ago somewhere in northern Germany. Zhe seems to have been raised by a coven that genetically engineered zher by splicing different demon DNA together.

“Well, ‘raised’ may be too strong a word, seeing as they used zher as an test subject for dangerous experimental spellwork,” Charles says with thinly veiled contempt. “Zher life was almost constantly under threat from every new idea they came up with. There were a lot of close calls. Apparently zhe was lucky, as zhe was one of the few genetically engineered demons there to survive for so long.

“But, unfortunately, as Vispilio grew older and strong enough to defend zherself, they began to see zher and zher abilities as a threat. Especially zher unparalleled skill in teleportation.

“They started hitting zher with theoretical hexes and curses. And when that wasn’t enough, they locked zher down and experimented on zher mind for years with invasive, nonconsensual psychic connections.

“Eventually, they came up with exactly the right combination of spells to trap zher into being their puppet. Once they had Vispilio under their complete control, they naturally decided to use zher as an assassin like the psychopaths they are.

“So, in conclusion, Vispilio has countless memories of kills that zhe conducted entirely unwillingly, in addition to decades of physical and mental torture.” Charles rubs at his eyes tiredly. “To be honest, it’s the worst infringement of an individual’s rights that I’ve ever seen.”

Erik is too quiet.

Charles glances up at him. His face is oddly blank.

“Do you know who is responsible for this?” Erik asks in a suspiciously even-tempered tone. “The identities of the magicians in this coven?”

Murder is clearly on his mind. Charles can almost see bloodlust flickering in his eyes, can almost feel it, palpable, in the air.

Charles hesitates.

“Promise me you won’t fly off and do something rash once I tell you,” he says cautiously.

Erik pulls a particularly petulant face. “But – ”

“Erik. Please. This coven is too powerful and insidious for one person to take down. We need more information. And an airtight offensive strategy.”

Erik huffs out an irritated sigh.

“Fine,” he says sullenly, crossing his arms. “I promise.”

Charles studies him for a moment. He relents. “I only recognized one of them, but I’d say it’s enough to start with.”

Erik narrows his eyes. “Who is it?”

Charles falters. “It’s...”

Erik shoots across the table and grabs one of his hands. “Charles,” he says seriously. “I promised. And I will never break a promise to you, not as I still live.”

Charles squeezes his eyes shut. He desperately hopes that’s true.

Otherwise, Erik might jump into a suicide mission.

“It’s Shaw. Sebastian Shaw.”

Everything freezes.

Erik’s grip involuntarily clamps down on Charles’ hand, and suddenly –

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“ _Max_!”

Charles starts awake to an unfamiliar ceiling.

He tries to scream, but his jaw won’t move. He tries to wrench his arms and legs off the floor, but his muscles stay relaxed. His eyes start moving, looking at things without his permission.

His eyes swivel to a tall cabinet. Its door, for some reason, is ajar.

His body sits up. Aches and pains shoot through him – and his mouth cries out when his legs shift. They’re probably both broken. His body doubles over with the pain, and hot tears are welling in his eyes.

For some reason, he’s indescribably angry. He hates how weak his body is.

“Max,” a woman screams. “ _Max_!”

Her voice sounds wrong, unsteady. It makes him uneasy, like it’s not supposed to sound that way.

His head slowly lifts to look at her.

She has soft hair tied back in a messy bun, a strained smile, and a checkered apron covered with –

His mind grinds to a halt.

That’s blood.

“Max,” she cries, relieved. “Du bist wach. Gott sei Dank.”

Charles, for some reason, understands her perfectly, even though his German is terrible.

 _You’re awake. Thank god_.

His eyes skitter over her, most likely looking for the wound. There’s a lot of blood. It’s pooling on the floor around her.

“Mutter, warum blutest du??” his mouth asks. Charles can feel his throat vibrate with the words, even though he’s not speaking them. It’s unsettling.

 _Mother_ , _why are you bleeding?_

“Keine Sorge, Liebling.”

_Don’t worry, love._

She tries to smile. Blood’s leaking through her teeth. “Ich habe einen Handel gemacht. Sie werden dich in Ruhe lassen von jetzt an _._ ”

_I made a trade. They won't come for you ever again._

Charles can feel fear building up in the back of his mind like a tidal wave.

“Was hat du getan, du hirnloses Weib?” his mouth shouts at her. He slams the ground next to him with a fist. “Ich bin nicht einmal dein richtiger Sohn! Ich bin ein verdammtes Wechselbalg!”

_What did you do, you brainless woman? I’m not even your real son! I’m a fucking changeling!_

She smiles at him, but her eyes are sad.

“Es ist mir egal, dass du ein Dämon bist. Du warst immer mein Sohn.”

_It doesn't matter that you're a demon. You've always been my son._

Something inside of him breaks.

“Was war die Abmachung??” he demands desperately. “Was hast du ihnen gegeben?!”

 _What did you trade?_ _What the_ fuck _did you give them?!_

“Ich werde dich immer lieben, mein Sohn,” she says. “Obwohl sie mein Herz genommen haben.”

_I'll always love you, my dear son._

_Even though they took my heart._

He watches her slump to the ground, the last of her blood finally dripping out of her gaping chest. His ears are ringing, his jaw is working soundlessly.

Tears spill out of his eyes, and his body shakes with rage.

He lets out a wordless roar that crashes through the room like a thunderbolt.

All the glass in the room shatters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

– the table, all the chairs, all the plates, everything, it all spins and shatters like a hurricane blasted its way through the kitchen.

Charles staggers backwards with a yell, shaking on his feet and grabbing the kitchen counter just to keep standing. Erik leaps out of his chair and starts towards Charles, looking at him with wide, panicked eyes.

“What was – agh!” Charles clutches at his forehead. It feels like his skull’s been smashed into shards.

“There’s a,” Erik gestures to his forehead. “Charles, it looks like there’s something glowing on your – ”

“What is it?”

“It – looks like a leaf – ”

A _leaf_ – “Kalfu,” Charles grinds out.

“Did he curse you?” Erik demands, grabbing at his shoulders. “Do I need to hunt the bastard down?”

“I don’t know,” Charles says miserably, gripping the counter to take some weight off of his weak knees. “I don’t know what he did, but I think it was supposed to be a gift, I don’t know – ”

“What did it do to you? What just happened?” Erik runs his hands up and down Charles’ arms in alarm when he doesn’t answer. “Are you hurt? Say something! Charles!”

Charles begins to sink down towards the floor. Erik hauls him into one of the kitchen chairs and kneels in front of him, looking outright terrified.

Erik clasps both of Charles’ trembling hands tightly. “Charles,” he begs. “Charles, please – ”

Charles shuts his eyes and tries to stop his head from spinning in sickening, unfamiliar circles.

“Charles,” Erik says in a small voice.

“There was... someone was screaming,” Charles says, disoriented and nearly hyper-ventilating. “I think something broke, something glass, it sounded like glass, and she was screaming, and – ” His breath hitches, and – he’s going to be horribly embarrassed about this later – tears start running down his cheeks. “I, she – ”

Charles can feel Erik’s grip tighten even more. “Was she – ” he starts and stops. “What did she scream?”

Charles sobs. “Max,” he rasps. “The name Max.”

“Max,” Erik repeats despairingly. “Oh, hell.”

He carefully lets go of Charles’ hands.

Charles blinks his eyes open in surprise. Somehow, it feels like some of the pressure in his head is gone.

“I think you saw a horrible memory, Charles. One of _my_ horrible memories.” Erik looks incredibly guilty about that, for some reason.

Charles stares at him in horror. “Oh, god,” he says. “Kalfu’s leaf – it must have – ”

“ – awakened your third eye,” Erik finishes.

Charles drops his head into his hands, curling up in the chair like a wounded animal. “God, Erik, I’m so sorry,” he sobs. “I’m so sorry, I – just feel so _upset_ – ”

“It’s all right,” Erik says. It sounds like his heart is breaking. “It’s all right, it’s all right, you’re all right, we’ll learn how you can control it, I’ll comb through your library for as long as it takes, please, don’t cry.”

Charles can’t help it. He cries helplessly into his hands, making broken, wounded noises that he fails to stifle.

Erik’s arms shoot around him and squeeze him close.

“I’m sorry,” Erik says miserably. “Oh, god, Charles, I’m so sorry.”

Charles cries into Erik’s shoulder, clutching at his suit like drowning men clutch at the sun. “Erik,” he pleads. “Erik.”

Erik hugs him close, murmuring soothing things that Charles can’t quite understand yet. All he can hear are screams and shattering glass and _even though they took my heart –_

Another sob wracks his whole frame.

Erik rubs comforting circles into his back. After a few minutes, Charles notices that he’s humming a slow song in deep baritone. Charles vaguely recognizes it, where does he know that from, it’s nice.

He closes his eyes to listen.

After a few verses, his breathing matches the beat.

Erik’s careful to not let their skin touch, Charles notices absently. That’s good. Very logical. Direct contact might trigger more uncontrolled psychic connections.

They stay there for a long time. Erik doesn’t stop humming.

Charles hazily realizes that his head is drooping down, losing tension, sinking into Erik’s shoulder. He doesn’t really think he’s capable of stopping it. He’s just so tired...

Charles falls asleep in Erik’s arms, right there in the kitchen.

-

Erik sits by Charles’ bedside, his fingers threaded together and his brow furrowed.

Charles is sleeping calmly, at least. His breathing is normal. He seems to be dreaming. Everything seems stabilized.

There are still tear streaks on his face, Erik notices belatedly. A pang of guilt stabs through him.

He never imagined this memory would hurt someone else. And out of all the people it could have hurt, it got _Charles_.

Somehow, that makes it ache worse than ever.

-

After Charles finally wakes up, he sends Erik back to hell for the night.

“Sleep,” he says firmly. “Then take care of your company. Check on Acidia. Maybe take a few days off work. Stop worrying about me and go take care of yourself.”

Erik grumbles, but eventually obeys.

With that done, Charles dials Hank’s number on the study telephone. It’s midnight, so he doesn’t know if he’s going to pick up or not. He hopes so.

“’lo?” Hank slurs.

“Hank,” says Charles, relieved. “Thank god. There’s been an unfortunate side effect from today’s psychic connection.”

Hank yawns. “What kinda side effect?”

“An opened third eye,” Charles admits sheepishly.

Hank pops up in front of the mansion in less than ten minutes, sprinting right through the front door and into the workroom.

“Good god,” Hank breathes as he studies Charles’ forehead with various magical microscopes and scanners. “It’s _glowing_. This is some pretty powerful mojo.”

“I can tell,” Charles says dryly.

“Course you can.” Hank chuckles a bit. “Well, other than the memory transfers and emotional residue, it looks like you’re pretty physically healthy. No signs of increased heart rate, cranial pressure, or sensory susceptibility. All normal.”

“So I’m – psychically compatible?” Charles asks, taken aback. “We don’t need to forcibly shut the third eye?”

“It would seem so.”

Charles had never thought of himself as gifted in that particular area of magic. It’s surprising to him that his mind would accept psychic parameters so readily.

“How do I safely control it?” asks Charles.

Hank bites his lip. “Well. In medical practice, we tell newly psychic patients to shut themselves away for some time. They’re supposed to use that separation time to construct mental shields through mental projection, and later build psychic pathways to help navigate other minds.” He shrugs. “I don’t actually specialize in that area, though, so I can’t tell you any exact techniques psychics use to do that stuff.”

Charles nods. He can try his hand at that.

He closes his eyes.

In his mind’s eye, Charles methodically builds up the mansion brick by brick. He’s had the blueprints memorized for decades, so it doesn’t take long. The architecture was originally based on ancient European castles, too, so it’s actually quite defensible. He adds in some tricks and traps on the inside just in case anyone breaks in, and voila.

Mental shields.

He feels less of Hank’s stress already.

“Hank,” he says with his eyes still closed. “I’ve got the shields. Could I ask to test a psychic pathway on you?”

“Oh!” Hank sounds surprised. “Sure.”

He comes closer and hesitantly lays a hand on Charles’ forehead.

“What should I search for? Are your scientific and magical studies a safe topic for me to look at?” Of course the answer to this question is necessary for Hank’s informed consent. But in addition to that... Charles _really_ doesn’t want to stumble into any of Hank’s teenage sexual fantasies.

“That’s fine.”

“Good. Okay, I’m going to go for it – ”

Charles shoots through Hank’s arm up into his brain, cutting through vague thoughts and sensory readings and crashing right into the memory banks.

“Right,” he mutters. “Now how do I search through these? Pathways, think pathways...”

He’s hit with an idea. A moment later, Hank’s ethereal, immaterial memory banks transform into the mental projection of a library.

“Wow,” Charles says, amazed. He looks up at the stacks. There are different subjects labeling the shelves. That’s awfully useful.

Sex and Romance. Sports and Entertainment. School Friends. Family. All that sort of stuff.

Aha, there it is.

Science and Magic.

He browses through the section. It seems to be separated into sub-divisions. There are mathematical formulae, periodic tables, sigil dictionaries, complex spell theories and potential ingredients, genetic codes...

Charles picks up a book from the ‘Lab Research Codex’ sub-division.

He flips through various memories of experiments and such. There’s a few funny stories about things exploding in the lab and patrons getting irritated at Hank. Charles grins and puts his palm on a page that looks particularly funny.

The memory starts playing out around him in wisps and shadows. Hank’s test tube of DNA explodes in the lab after he spills a drink on an exposed electric cord, he shouts dramatically into the lab ceiling for forgiveness, a crowd of angry magicians scold him at their next shareholders meeting –

Charles frowns.

Wait a second. Was that –

He peers at the hazy group of magicians. There are a few that stand out. Hank must remember those people more. But yes, some faces are much clearer than others, and Charles vaguely recognizes a few of them.

Like the infamous Sebastian Shaw, who’s currently sneering at Hank in the front row of magicians.

Charles slams the book shut and flies out of the library double doors, right back into his own mind.

He’s back in his body, mind completely locked in place, his shields all the way up. He’s still reeling like a ship without an anchor, even five seconds later. He can say with absolute assurance, however, that it doesn’t have anything to do with psychic transference issues.

He doesn’t tell that to Hank, of course.

“Are you okay?” Hank asks, concerned. He takes his hand off of Charles’ forehead. “Are you experiencing vertigo? Do you feel like you’re unattached to your physical form in any way?”

Charles shakes his head. “No, no,” he gasps. “Just, uh...” Charles thinks fast. “Just moved back into my own head too quickly, I think. It’s an odd feeling.”

“Try to slow it down next time,” Hank advises. “You look really pale.”

“I will,” Charles promises. “Thanks for checking up on me, Hank.”

“Not a problem,” Hank says sincerely. “Any time.”

He turns and starts packing up his magical medical equipment.

Charles stares at Hank’s turned back with a sinking feeling. It sort of tastes like betrayal and disenchantment. His body feels numb and his mind is buzzing with static. He vaguely realizes that he’s gone into shock.

He had a damn good reason to do that, though, because – for god’s sake –

Hank is in _Shaw’s coven_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seriously go eat some ice cream. It's for your own emotional well-being. 
> 
> (Unless you're lactose-intolerant. Go eat frozen yogurt or something that won't make you sick)


	8. Alarum and Adrenaline

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait. This one was a bitch to write.

Erik stares at the map on the workroom floor, right where frantic red circles are scribbled around Dundee, Illinois. There are crisscrossing red lines running all over the world, from city to city, with all sorts of articles and papers pinned to them. Charles must have been up all night doing this.

“So you’re saying,” he says slowly. “That the International Conservative Coven is actually at its heart a black magic crime ring and cult that experiments illegally and brutally on demons for nefarious purposes, and is possibly clandestinely headed by Sebastian Shaw.”

“Exactly,” Charles confirms.

“And that Hank is in on it.”

“Well,” Charles says uncomfortably, shifting his weight from one foot to another. “He’s one of ten thousand or so coven members. I’m not sure if he’s even involved, or how much he knows.”

“Okay,” Erik says lightly, leaning back against the desk and crossing his arms. “Easy enough to find out.”

Charles looks at him, confused. “How?”

Erik shakes his head with a grin. Charles’ complete lack of guile is adorable. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

He sinks through the floor and desk, and straight into Hank’s laboratory in Dundee, Illinois.

The intruder alarm suddenly goes off.

It’s an irritating pealing screech that’s incredibly distracting, so Erik takes care of that right away. He zeroes in on the source and tears through the circle and its sigils in one fell swoop, taking out a chunk of concrete wall in the process.

The alarm cuts off immediately, thank hell. Erik straightens up and revels in the sudden peace and quiet.

The lights flicker and there’s a scuffling, scrambling sound somewhere in the depths of the lab. It’s an enormous, cavernous place with hundreds of glass cabinets full of stored test tubes and dozens of lab tables covered in obscure magical and scientific equipment. It’s practically labyrinthine.

Not that it’ll help Hank escape.

Erik lazily stalks down the aisles of tall glass cases and lab tables with a shark-like smile. “Hank,” he calls out, scraping his sharp claws against the glass face of one of the cabinets. “Remember me? Little old Magnus? Mr. Demon?”

He can hear the far-off echoes of Hank trying to sneak around quietly, little touches of squeaks and creaks, little indrawn breaths and brushes of clothing. Erik beams. It’s always so much easier to catch prey that’s scared out of its mind.

“Haaaank,” he practically trills. “We both know you’re down here...”

No response, just as expected. Erik likes that Hank is following the script properly; it lets him really get into his groove.

He makes his gait heavy and loud, making sure that Hank can hear every footstep hit the floor with every other syllable.

“I just want to have a _conversation_...”

That does it. Hank jumps into silent action, skittering one way and another, trying to move through different aisles to avoid him. He can hear it, he can hear the frantic uptick in Hank’s breathing, the rush of his steps.

Erik grins.

Now that Hank’s on the move, he can sense the metal of Hank’s glasses, his buttons, his watch, his pens in his pocket all jangling and whipping around together.

Victory is so sweet.

Erik raises a hand, feeling the metal in the room thrum around him, and clenches his fist. Metal strips tear themselves off of pipelines and throw themselves into the ground like prison bars, completely trapping Hank in place a hundred feet away.

Erik walks over, taking his time. Checks his pocket watch.

“Fifteen seconds left,” he notes. “Good, good.”

“Fifteen seconds for what?” Hank asks with terrified eyes.

Erik glances up at him. “To get back to Westchester, of course,” he says. The metal bars wrap around Hank, immobilizing him, and they sink through the floor together.

Erik walks up to Charles, dragging Hank along behind him by the metal tied around him. “Back,” he says cheerfully.

He boggles. “Eri – ” He takes a big breath in to stop himself. “ _Mag_ nus,” he says sternly. “What is this?”

“A little chat,” Erik says.

Charles is momentarily speechless.

Erik turns to Hank. “So,” he says pleasantly. “Hank. Have you betrayed the morality of your very race and profession and committed crimes of the highest atrocities against both human and demonkind?”

Hank seems to be close to death judging by the color of his face. He also seems to have no voice.

“That’s a bit, er, heavy-handed,” Charles says to the side. Erik looks over at him. “Wouldn’t you say? A little... accusatory?”

Erik frowns. “Is it?”

Charles nods.

Erik turns back to Hank. “Right, then. Less accusatory, less accusatory... Have you, Hank, recently aided in the magical brainwashing or mind-controlling of captured individuals?”

No response.

He glances at Charles, who wiggles his hand and makes a non-committal sound. “Maybe a little drier? Easier? More factual?”

“Right.” Erik thinks for a moment. Factual, factual... He rubs at his chin. Yes or no questions should work. “Hank. Are you, or are you not, working on experimental projects with Sebastian Shaw through the International Conservative Coven?”

Hank looks startled.

“Y-yeah, I am,” he says. “I’ve been working on ICC funded genetic research for five or six years, actually.”

Erik looks at Charles smugly. Finally, they’re getting somewhere. “Have you now. And?”

Hank bites his lip. “And... uh... I’ve been writing papers for the ICC scientific peer-reviewed journal.”

“I’ve read those articles,” Charles pipes up. “All of your experiments were very well-designed, I must say.”

Erik crosses his arms and wonders if and how that’s relevant.

“Thank you,” Hank whispers with a starry look of wonder in his eyes, gazing at Charles like he’d never seen another professional, well-read magician in his life. The metal bars may or may not squeeze a little tighter for a moment. “I based them on your methods, the ones you presented on in Vienna at the – ”

“Moving on,” Erik interrupts in a bored voice, checking his nails. Hank’s mouth snaps shut. “The ICC’s genetic experiments. Summarize.”

Hank nods vigorously. “I mainly studied the differences between magical and non-magical genetic code, looked at various generational progressions, demonic samples, that sort of thing. Tried to figure out where the magic comes from, how it works, why it works differently for people – ”

“Why did Shaw want it?” Erik demands. “How did he use it?”

Hank’s gaze darts around the room. “Well, he wrote a couple of papers based on some of my findings on molecular and genetic demonic containment a few years back.”

Erik turns to Charles with one eyebrow raised.

“It’s a field dealing with magician-demon spells and interactions,” Charles hastily explains. “Mostly to do with the science of warding off, calling up, and signing contracts with demons.”

“Right.” Erik leans forward, weaving his fingers together behind his back. “So, given that he knew about specific demonic molecular reactions from your thorough experiments... Could Shaw have used your findings to help facilitate the torture and mind-control of, say, our mutual acquaintance Vispilio?”

Hank stares at Erik in abject horror. His face slowly drains of any color and his eyes begin to bug out the longer he thinks it over.

Erik waits a beat to let it all sink in properly. The shock, the guilt, the self-disgust... Ah, so satisfying to see them all rise to the surface like this, curling around Hank’s eyes and mouth. Erik likes being reminded of how good he is at this kind of thing. It’s been a couple decades, but it looks like he’s still got it.

He glances at Charles, who’s sat down in the desk chair behind him and is paying rapt attention to Hank’s every facial tic. Erik eyes Hank’s bloodless face himself – it seems to have frozen in an expression eerily similar to that of a degenerate circus clown – and decides he seems horrified enough. He most definitely looks pathetic enough.

“Well?” Erik snaps at him.

Hank’s mouth is gaping and gulping like a goldfish, but no words come out. Sweat drips down his temple and his eyes are darting around the room like they’re trying to make a break for it.

“Out with it.”

Again, nothing.

Erik grits his jaw. His patience is all dried up, and he’s got no pity for this naïve greenhorn magician and his ill-timed disorientation right now.

“Are you, or are you not,” Erik barks, shoving himself into Hank’s space and spitting the words in his face, “an _accessory to the crime_?”

“I didn’t _know_!” Hank cries out desperately, ducking his head to the side and shying away from Erik’s angry lunge. “I didn’t know he would use it like that! Not when I published it!”

Erik’s gaze hardens, zeroing in on the words left unsaid. “So when _did_ you know?”

Hank squeezes his eyes shut. “I – I didn’t – ”

“When did you _know_?!” Erik bursts out. “When exactly did you figure out your coven was making _demons_ into _mindless, obedient slaves_ on the side?”

Hank is shaking, hot tears are leaking through his tightly shut eyes, his teeth are gritting and clacking with grief and fear.

“ _When_?” Erik roars. He tightens a fist, and the metal bands constrict around Hank like an angry snake. “When did you find out about it and decide to do _nothing_?”

The bands dig sharply into Hank’s ribs. Erik knows that if he just twisted his fingers another two inches, they would slice through his skin, slither through the ribs, and thread right towards his heart. It would be so easy.

Some of that must show in Erik’s eyes, because after a few seconds of glaring daggers with that thought tumbling around in his head, Hank cracks.

“Okay, _okay_!” he cries out with a desperate look in his wide eyes.

Erik blinks in surprise. He didn’t actually think Hank would fold that fast – most magicians with illicit, murky backgrounds take a great deal more convincing before they finally crack and spill everything that their dirty little lives depend on – but he’s not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

“ – It was at the last coven conference,” Hank forces out with the last breath of his crushed lungs.

Erik hides a smirk. Easiest interrogation ever.

The fetters loosen a bit. Hank starts to get his breath back, huffing out painful wheezes through his raw throat.

All part of the art – Erik’s rewarding his good behavior. It’s like training a stubborn pet. Though, of course, Erik has raised a pet dragon once, and he can say with some certainty that training an angry, fire-breathing dragon is much easier than training a run-of-the-mill, conceited magician to act civil, so his comparison is probably a bit off the mark.

Hank is staring at the floor in mortification, seemingly unable to meet anyone’s eyes. “I knew something bad was happening when he, uh, presented some of his new theses this past winter.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Erik can see Charles rear back when that information hits him. That was less than six months ago, before Charles had ever even met Hank.

Charles is silent for a moment. “Which ones?” he asks.

Hank looks down at his shoes, his shoulders slumping. It’s a pretty pitiful picture.

Erik scowls. He wouldn’t be all twisted up in guilty knots like this if he’d actually done something about Shaw, he thinks scathingly. Could have spoken up. Hell, he probably could have saved a few lives, both demon and human.But no. Hank was too busy protecting his professional reputation in the magical community. Didn’t bother to tell anyone or do anything to help. He just looked out for himself. 

Magicians.

Hank finally takes in a long, shaky breath and talks.

“They were his two papers on demonic brain tissue and magical obedience and reinforcement,” he says quietly to the corner of the room. “I just... I don’t think many people knew, but I remembered documenting effects of certain sigils that worked better on demonic tissue than the norm in last year’s magia-neural study, micro stuff, but it was barely let in the journal at all as an article because of a lab accident, so I knew something was odd, I _knew_ they were doing something, they _had to be_ – ”

Erik releases a little more pressure from the metal bands with an irritated sigh. He leans against the edge of the workroom desk, crossing his arms.

“Tell us everything you know,” Erik says impatiently. “Locations, contacts, supply lines, defenses, the _works_.” He emphasizes that with a subtle twist and roil of the metal restraints, scraping across Hank’s ribcage just close enough to break the skin. Hank seems to pick up on his little hint, given the rapidly building fear in his eyes.

Hank swallows and wets his lips, but his next sentence seems to be stuck somewhere down his throat. A few nonsense syllables come out, just a few weak attempts at phrases.

Erik is getting a bit frustrated with this. It’s like pulling teeth. He wonders how Hank could ever hope to do business with seasoned demons or cutthroat magicians. Certainly not with those nerves. That must be why he’s more of an esoteric theoretical scientist rather than a hands-on practicing magician.

Erik smirks mirthlessly, baring his sharp teeth. Hank blanches and instinctively shies away from him.

“Tell us everything.” Erik stares him down. “ _Now_.”

Hank does.

-

Hours later, Charles knocks on the third guest bedroom door.

“Come in!” Vispilio answers in a stage whisper.

Charles hesitantly cracks open the door. Vispilio is sitting on the wide windowsill, zher long, slender tail unthinkingly wrapping around the nearby bedpost. This room overlooks the lake, and the misty grounds going into the nearby woods. Charles can see why zhe likes it. It’s calm and spacious, just like zher mind.

“Good morning,” Charles says. Zhe smiles at him. “I – ”

“Shhh,” Vispilio says with a finger on zher lips. Zhe points to the edge of the windowsill, where one of the panels is cracked open. Charles follows the line of zher finger.

There’s a bird’s nest perched there, with three sleeping baby bluebirds in it. There are some speckled teal egg shards still framing the rim of the nest, so they must be fairly young. One of the chicks gives off a tiny little peep and ruffles their tiny little wings before settling back down into sleep.

Zher gaze rolls over their tiny feathers like a cloud brushing past a mountain. It’s unbearably tender.

After a gentle moment, zhe carefully and quietly shuts the window panel. The chicks keep sleeping, completely undisturbed.

“They’re blue, like me,” Vispilio whispers so quietly that Charles can barely hear it. He stares at them with zher, at their tiny tails and soft, blue feathers, seeing them through zher eyes.

Zhe turns to him with a bright smile. “Good morning,” zhe says pleasantly.

Charles smiles back. “They’re beautiful.”

“Yes, they are,” Vispilio says fondly.

“Blue is a lovely color on the both of you,” Charles offers tentatively. “You match.”

Vispilio grins at that. “For adopted children, there’s quite an uncanny resemblance, isn’t there.”

“There is,” Charles chuckles. He settles on the windowsill beside Vispilio. “Where did you find them?”

Zhe pauses, focusing again on the rise and fall of feathers in that small little nest through the glass.

“The nest was wedged between the bars of my cell window,” zhe says at last. “It’d fallen from its branch in a storm. The parents couldn’t reach it, but I could.” Zher eyes are so soft and warm, looking at those chicks. “So I took care of them.”

“That’s wonderful,” Charles murmurs. His eyes crinkle at the corners. “Well, you’ve done a bang-up job. They’re by far the best-behaved bluebirds I’ve ever seen.”

Vispilio looks at him. There’s fragility in zher eyes, insecurity, uncertainty, when she asks, “Really?”

“Really,” Charles says seriously. “I’ve had more than my share of encounters with bluebirds. They’ve pecked at my head so many times, it’s honestly a wonder I’m not bald. You seem to be a very good influence on them.”

Vispilio lets out a burst of laughter, which surprises them both. “They pecked at your head?”

Charles sighs into eternity. “I have it on good authority that, in the right kind of light, I look eerily similar to an egg thief. Something to do with my egg-shaped head, I believe.”

Zhe giggles. “Who said that?”

Charles lets out a huff of breath, but it does nothing to dislodge the familiar weight that’s once again settled in his chest. He tries to smile, but his eyes are sad.

“It was my sister,” he confesses.

The smile dims on Vispilio’s face, and zher tail droops from the bedpost and onto the floor. Charles feels piercingly guilty about that. He didn’t mean to make zher stop smiling.

Zhe doesn’t seem to mind much, though. Zhe’s just looking at him, the same way zhe was looking at the bluebirds. Warm and tender.

Like he’s family.

“You miss her,” Vispilio says softly.

Charles blinks furiously to stave off tears. When he’s finally under control, he gives a short nod, so short it’s almost indiscernible. Like he can’t even admit to himself that he nodded at all.

“You know, sometimes my baby bluebirds screech and cry,” Vispilio says musingly, looking past him, somewhere far away. “Usually it’s because they’re hungry or thirsty or scared, but...”

Zhe pauses, like zhe’s mapping out the right words.

“Sometimes... I think it’s just because they’re sad,” Vispilio says simply. “They remember things, you know? Like their parents. Sometimes they sing bits of what their parents used to, when they were up high in the nest. It’s like they’re singing to remember them. Or mourn them.”

It’s... both, Charles realizes. Remembering; mourning; they’re exactly the same, both poking at an open wound where a person used to be.

“You know what, though?” Vispilio says thoughtfully. “I think it’s good that they remember. And I think it’s good that they feel sad about it.”

Charles glances up at zher with a pinch between his eyebrows. “Why?”

Zhe gives a half-shrug and a bit of a deprecating smile. “I don’t know... I guess... because... it means that they still love them, even now, right? Even though they’ve been gone for so long?”

Charles absorbs that, lets it sink in slowly. Light shines through the window and dances on the carpet in front of them, right where Raven liked to sit in the sun.

“Yeah,” he admits with a wavering voice. “That’s exactly what it means.”

He’s fending off blurry, salty tears when the end of Vispilio’s tail cautiously reaches up and wraps around Charles’ pinkie finger. It’s unexpectedly warm and soft, covered with wispy, silken blue fur. He looks down at zher tail, lightly twisted around his finger, and he thinks, _hug_.

Neither of them say anything. Vispilio’s tail may be holding on to his pinkie, but right now, it feels like he’s the one holding on to zher.

Charles scrubs at his eyes with his free hand.

“We’ll find her after this,” Vispilio promises calmly. “The three of us.”

Charles nods with a real, if a little watery, smile this time.

“Yeah,” he says. “I know.”

-

_Keep it casual,_ Erik repeats to himself as he walks up to Charles, who is still frantically running around and packing things as he has been for the past couple hours. _Everything is normal. And nothing I’m about to say or do is in any way out of the ordinary. At all._

He wishes his body believed that, but his cheeks are already starting to burn purple and it feels like bats are tearing up his insides.

“Oh, yes, Charles,” Erik says with a forced nonchalance, as if he had just remembered to remind Charles about an appointment or some other mundane thing.

“Hm?” Charles turns towards him, simultaneously packing a few things into that storage portal in his hand and hurriedly scribbling down magician-y things on a pad of paper. The level of multi-tasking Charles is achieving at the moment is really quite impressive.

“I forgot to give this to you,” Erik says as offhandedly as he can manage. He pulls the ring out of his pocket.

Charles furrows his brow at it.

“It’s a... protection talisman,” Erik explains carefully. “And a gift, in return for the pocket watch you gave me.”

Charles looks up at Erik with astonishment. “You got me a gift?”

Erik rubs the back of his neck, suddenly feeling ten thousand years of embarrassment hit him at once. It’s like it’s all been bottled up and saved for this exact moment in time. “Humans trade gifts, don’t they? I thought – Was I not supposed to – ”

“You... got me a gift,” Charles says slowly, like he can’t believe the words coming out of his own mouth.

“ _Made_ you a gift,” corrects Erik.

Charles does a double take and studies the ring in more detail. His eyes are full of wonder.

“ _Made_ me a gift,” repeats Charles, apparently unable to take his eyes off the ring still sitting in Erik’s hand.

“Yeah,” Erik mumbles. “I did.”

He shoves his hand out, but he’s too embarrassed to watch Charles take it from him. He looks at the wall instead. He knows he’s blushing worse than an eggplant.

Charles’ fingertips brush Erik’s palm as he carefully picks up the ring. Those light touches shock through Erik’s system, which makes the eggplant situation all the worse. Wonderful.

“Erik,” Charles says quietly. “This is – ”

Erik sneaks a glance at him before returning his gaze to the wall.

“I – ”

He stops again.

“You don’t have to keep it if you don’t want it,” Erik cuts in sharply at the wall, not wanting to hear Charles politely and compassionately turn him down. He can’t hear that. Not yet. Not when they’re basically going into battle. “But will you at least wear it until after this is over?”

He steels himself for whatever is coming next.

“Erik, I love it.”

Erik whips his head around.

Charles is beaming. Right into Erik’s face. It’s like the searing glow of molten metal in the pit of a volcano, burning onto his eyelids, blinding him.

But Charles isn’t finished with him yet, apparently, because then he says, “I’ll wear it all the time. Thank you.”

And Charles puts the ring on, right onto his finger.

Right in front of Erik.

Erik feels dazed, like he’d just lost a pint of blood.

“Yuh,” he says intelligently. He vaguely realizes it’s probably not the ideal response. He shakes his head a bit, trying to put his broken thoughts back together. Erik clears his throat and gestures vaguely at the ring now glinting on Charles’ finger. “You. Uh. Good. That’s... good.”

He’s trying to come up with something else to say that would make him seem less like a moron when there’s a silent puff of smoke in the corner of the room.

“Ready to go?” Vispilio asks.

“As we’ll ever be,” Charles says. There’s a beat of silence. “Wait, wait, I think I forgot the extra chalk – ”

“We don’t have to take the whole mansion along with us, Charles,” Erik points out. Charles has been packing for two straight hours, already. What else could they possibly need? “Haven’t you packed enough already?”

“It’s best to be prepared for everything,” Charles says primly. “I’ll just grab the chalk. After that, we leave.”

“Fine, fine.”

It turns out that, in addition to an extra box of chalk, Charles also requires a sealed bottle, a stack of dried leaves, and a pen.

But after _that_ , they leave.

-

Charles has to admit, he had thought that Shaw’s evil lair would be a bit... cleaner. This is more unkempt than he’d imagined. There’s dirt and trash everywhere, and rats are skittering around in the corners of the hallways. Well, it is the underground prison portion of his fortress, Charles reasons. Surely Shaw’s actual quarters are maintained better than this.

Though, he’d always thought of Shaw as the type to live in opulent luxury while letting other people rot and starve. It sort of fits, now that he thinks about it.

“I’ll start here,” Charles shouts over the blaring alarm as he pulls out his enchanted lock pick. “You two, get as many people out as fast as you can. And, if one of you could disable the alarm afterwards, that would be wonderful.”

It only takes a few moments for the lock pick’s enchantment to kick in, so the work goes fast. He tries to smile reassuringly at each prisoner when their doors swing open, project a little comfort through his new psychic connection, so that they’ll stop looking at him like he’s going to tear them apart. It does seem to help a little, or so he tells himself.

He has around ten cells open when Erik finally cuts that blasted alarm.

Charles glances down the halls of cells. Demons are starting to trickle out the doors and into the hall. They’re all sorts of shapes and sizes, but one thing is the same – all of them look terrified.

Well, not the bristling one that stomps up to him and snarls, “Who the fuck are you,” right into his face. He can practically feel protective instinct rolling off of him. Not to mention testosterone.

“Charles Xavier,” he replies politely, trying to exude calm. “It’s nice to meet you. All of you,” he adds, looking at the group tentatively assembling around him.

The angry one grunts, and Charles can sense that’s he’s a bit more mollified than he lets on. “Hell are you doin’ here, kid?”

“We’re here to extract all of you,” Charles says. “Magnus?” he calls over his shoulder.

“Charles,” Erik answers, fluttering right by his side.

“Have the containment spells already kicked in?” Charles asks.

“Yes, we’ll have to fight our way to the circle and break it to escape.”

Charles bites his lip. He’d hoped for them all to escape before those god-awful containment spells were activated, but it looks like they’ll have to do this the hard, brutish way instead.

Erik frowns, suddenly looking over the group of demons around them. “Are any of you fighters?”

Some of them nod, most shake their heads with terror etched into their faces.

“Right,” Erik mutters. “Well, those that can fight, come with us if you want. Those that can’t...” He pauses.

“Stay with Vispilio,” Charles finishes. “Zhe’s a skilled teleporter that can easily keep all of you safe from guards for a while. Then zhe can get you out of here, the very second we’ve taken down all the layers of containment.”

“Vispilio?” one of the small girls asks.

“Yes, er, hang on a moment – ” Charles says. He presses down on his palm with one finger. The center underneath his nail starts to glow. “Vispilio, could you come here for a minute, please?” he asks into his hand.

There’s a whiff of smoke and Vispilio is there.

“Hello, Vispilio,” Charles says. “Could you take care of the people that stay here until we break containment?”

“Sure,” Vispilio says agreeably.

“Thank you.” Charles turns back to their small crowd. “Now, who is coming with us?”

The angry one glares, but puffs out his chest and says, “Me.”

Another one – who seems a bit deranged, from what Charles can sense through his wildly contradicting emotions, anyway – raises his hand and shouts, “OOH, OOH, OOH, ME, ME, ME, CAN I GO?”

Charles shares a quick look with Erik, who shrugs. “You certainly can. Anyone else?”

“Yes,” says a quiet demon with white, feathered wings. “I will go.”

Charles nods. “Right. Let’s – ” He turns towards the staircase that runs up to the main fortress, and –

The door at the top is swinging open.

Charles frowns. He’d thought he’d have to take it down through magic. It was tightly sealed just a minute ago, why –

And then he sees him.

He’s standing there, his eyes glittering, flanked by a beautiful woman and a smug-looking man, sipping on a glass of champagne. They’re all wearing white.

Shaw smiles widely, showing all his teeth, but it doesn’t reach his cold, pale eyes. “Well, well, well. Max and Charles, all grown up. And working together! Isn’t that charming.”


	9. Ire and Ice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Revenge is a dish best served cold." - Old Klingon Proverb
> 
> Y'all are in for a wild ride. Good luck.

Erik knows he’s there the second the door swings open.

His forearm burns where the numbers and letters used to be, and he just knows. His essence, or soul, or whatever you want to call it – is screaming with it.

And then he looks up, and sees him.

Everything slows down to a crawl.

Shaw looks exactly the same as he did over ten thousand years ago. The only thing that’s different is his suit jacket style. Apparently white is in, this century. Even his trademark insincere smile is whiter.

There’s a roaring in Erik’s ears, angry, frothy waves are building up and crashing, breaking, against the walls of his skull. Right now, he doesn’t even remember his own name, he feels wild, unstable, explosive, a madman waiting to be set loose inside his own head.

He can’t even understand the words issuing out of Shaw’s mouth, nothing at all, thousands of languages are jumbled up and sinking and drowning in his mind, it’s as if all his thought processes have shut down except for one thing.

Erik is hurtling up the stairway like an avenging dragon, screaming an ancient war cry, bellowing like a soldier of old, the same way he screamed at the head of an invading army, the same way he screamed in the deep chasm of an erupting volcano, the same way he screamed when his smiling mother died with a gaping hole where her heart used to be –

Erik’s claws are inches away from Shaw’s throat, he’s a second away from ripping out his trachea, and in that moment, Erik feels triumphant, he’s finally here, he’s found him, he’s going to kill him, it’ll be over, they’re face-to-face and Erik is going to enjoy watching the life flicker out of his eyes, he looks up to see it, and –

It's the oddest thing.

Shaw is _smirking_.

Erik’s whole body is blasted backwards in a sudden shockwave – he splits a small crater into the concrete wall across the hallway with the force of the impact. Cracks spread across the wall like spider webs, and the fractured pieces shudder and topple to the floor.

That’s new, Erik thinks dazedly, shaking his head to get rid of the fuzziness creeping in on the edges of his vision.

He can hear Shaw chuckle.

Erik forces his head up past the pain of his broken bones, burning his stare into Shaw, snarling like a feral animal.

“Oh, Max, you and your endearing headlong rush into suicide,” Shaw says fondly, taking a few leisurely, casually steps downwards into the prison pit with a hand in his pocket and swagger in his step.

He finishes off his champagne and tosses the glass behind him carelessly. There’s a tinkling sound when it shatters somewhere up there on the marble floor. “Well, don’t worry, I’ll oblige. It would be my pleasure to kill you.”

All Erik can see past the blood dripping in his eyes and the wooziness blurring the edges of his thoughts is Shaw advancing on him, stepping down the stairs like they were covered in gold leaf and red carpeting instead of stains and dirt, grinning, drawing out his hand from his pocket.

Erik knows with sudden clarity that this is where he dies.

Shaw is going to make sure to do it poetic justice, too. He’ll tear out Erik’s heart with that one hand, just like he did to his mother, and he’ll eat it for dinner tonight. He’ll probably even make a toast to ‘Max’ before the meal begins. Most of the dinner guests will clap politely and have no idea what’s happening. And then they’ll all cut his heart into tiny, neat pieces with embossed French silverware, eat it in dainty little bites, wash it down with exorbitantly expensive red wine, and finally cleanse their palates with sorbet in preparation for the next course.

Erik watches him stretch out his hand that’s covered with intricate silver bands and rings, lift up his palm to strike the final blow, and –

Something’s suddenly blocking his view of Shaw.

Some _one_.

“Excuse me,” Charles says mildly, but Erik knows without a doubt that there’s steel underneath. “I can’t allow that.”

Erik hears the shockwave blast Shaw sends right in their direction – even more powerful than the one that sent Erik flying. It shoves Erik’s head further into the concrete, it’s so strong.

When the winds die down, and Erik can open his eyes again...

Charles is still standing there.

He’s planted right where he was, arms crossed and weight shifted onto one side like he’s slightly annoyed but trying to be polite about it.

Erik’s eyes widen.

The ring Erik tempered in the heart of a volcano, wove spell after spell into, carried in his pocket for days – it must be doing its job.

Thank the seven hells.

There’s another blast. And another. And another. Shaw must think Charles is using a limited protection amulet that’ll run out of juice if he hits it enough. And they’re strong blasts, too, strong enough to buffet Erik around even from this distance, but Charles...

Nothing happens to him. He’s as solid and unmoved as a mountain.

Erik laments the fact that he can’t actually see Shaw’s face right now. It’s got to be priceless. He can’t even imagine what expression he’s making.

“If you’re quite finished,” Charles deadpans. He puts two fingers to his temple, closes his eyes, and takes a fortifying breath.

There’s a beat of silence. Erik imagines Shaw gaping like a goldfish at that, completely speechless. It’s probably not what he’s actually doing, he’s probably wearing a mask of elitist indifference or something, but just the thought of it makes Erik grin uncontrollably.

Then Charles turns to the side, back to the prisoners. “Right, all of you, do what we planned. You three – ” he gestures at the volunteers – “go find the circle while I take care of this.”

“You got it, boss!” The annoying one springs to attention and salutes as Vispilio quietly evacuates the recklings, probably to some closet or back room that’s completely out of the way.

The one with metal lining his bones, however, crosses his arms and glances up at the stairwell. “How the hell are we gonna get out of here?”

“The stairs,” Charles says matter-of-factly, fingers still at his temple.

Then he steps to the side to let them through, and Erik can finally see. He frowns – Shaw is still standing there with a murderous look on his face, and he has two handpicked subordinates behind him, how are they just going to –

Wait a minute.

The fullmetal one takes a few tentative steps towards him, but Shaw doesn’t move a muscle. He doesn’t even glance to the side to see who it is. His eyes are still narrowed at the space where Charles was standing just a moment ago, unblinking.

It’s almost like he’s –

“Go!” Charles orders with a strained voice. “I can’t keep it up much longer.”

There’s a second of hesitation before they dash up the stairs, weaving past the three frozen magicians and into the main house. Their thudding footsteps fade down the hallway just as Charles’ shoulders start to tremble with effort.

He drops his hand back to his side and straightens up, releasing a relieved huff of breath.

Shaw’s eyes flicker as Charles’ hold dissipates.

His eyes dart around, at Charles, at Erik, and the rest of the empty dungeon, and his lips flatten into a thin line.

He’s the closest to flustered Erik has ever seen him. He can see the confusion and embarrassment take hold, and finally, a dawning understanding.

As his realization sets in, Shaw’s face slowly churns into something dark and ugly. His frame goes rigid, and his fists are so tight that his knuckles are stark white.

Shaw’s not going to take Charles lightly again. Hell, it’s been an age since Erik last saw a psychic actually stop someone’s time. Shaw’s certainly not going to be stupid enough to try to take them both on alone. Not after that.

Erik brushes off some loose dust and rock from his shoulders and stands up. He’s very nearly healed. Just a few broken bones that he can already feel shifting back together. Good timing.

He rolls his shoulders, shakes the dust off his wings, and stands behind Charles.

-

Charles feels Erik step up behind him, burning with a steady, unshakeable resolve that seems to be contagious. It has Charles straightening his spine and squaring his shoulders.

The extra boost it gives him helps him force back the near-overwhelming psychic push coming from the woman in white. Her mind’s been creeping up on him ever since the door opened, like cold fingers trying to close around his throat, and when it retreats he releases a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

Now that he’s had a moment to breathe, Charles shoves her mind back into her skull and locks it up. It takes a fair amount of psychic energy, roughly half of his arsenal, but he knows if he doesn’t do something about her fast she’s going to be a formidable opponent.

She staggers back with a shout, bracing herself on the wall with one dainty hand. Her champagne glass falls down the stairs, splintering into shards with a hard crash.

Surprise piques like a bubble popping, both in Shaw and – who is the other man? Charles skims his mind – Stryker. They both turn towards her in alarm.

“Emma?” Shaw asks evenly.

She doesn’t respond, only clutches her head and curls into herself.

“Emma,” Shaw snaps. He’s full of roiling, ugly emotions, has been ever since he walked in. Right now, though, with Emma’s show of weakness, he’s almost swimming in disgust. Charles doesn’t even have to be a psychic to recognize it crawling all over his face.

It’s appalling.

“Emma is a bit distraught, I’m afraid,” Charles remarks. Shaw turns his eyes back on him, and an absurd amount of hatred rolls back into the room. “I did just forcibly shut her third eye, after all.”

Shaw’s face goes still, and his eyes study Charles for a moment. Considering him.

He slips a bag of ash out of his pocket and marks some on his forehead with a swipe of his thumb. In addition to his prickly, embedded guards that sting like barbed wire whenever Charles tries to dig in, a few new shields rise up.

They’re strong, too. He must have prepared that ash with Emma at some point for this very purpose.

Charles notices that he doesn’t give any of the ash to Stryker, however, who seems awfully confused about everything that’s happening. He does a quick skim of Stryker’s mind, and there are no psychic protections or guards implanted there whatsoever.

How lucky.

It’s easy to flip the switch in Stryker’s mind and send him right to sleep. He drops like a stone to the floor not a second later.

Shaw doesn’t even glance behind him to check on Stryker. He just keeps his eyes trained on Charles. Like a predator waiting to strike.

Charles smiles thinly.

It’s exactly what Charles thought he’d do.

Stryker’s limp form suddenly swings up from the ground like a puppet with strings, right behind Shaw.

He closes his arms around Shaw like a vise, squeezing him in a strange facsimile of an embrace. It’s hard enough to knock the breath out of Shaw’s lungs, but – because Charles is a gentleman – not quite hard enough to break his ribs.

Charles ambles up a few stairs until he’s level with him.

He reaches up with a handkerchief – embroidered with all the best counterspells, of course – and carefully wipes the ashen mark off of Shaw’s forehead. He feels Shaw’s shields crumble into dust. It’s quite satisfying.

“There we are,” Charles says, pleased. Shaw’s eyes are so wide that they look comically disproportionate to the rest of his face. Charles has to say, the look sort of suits him. Much better than that smarmy smug look from before, at any rate.

“Now,” Charles says. “To business.”

Shaw jerks his head backward as Charles raises his fingers up to Shaw’s face.

“Behave,” Charles scolds, placing his fingers firmly to Shaw’s temple.

Then he looks serenely into Shaw’s eyes, his mind, his soul, calm on the surface but dangerous just below that, and says, –

“All that experimenting, all that torture, all that corruption.” Charles shakes his head with a huff. “You must have known that there would be a reckoning someday, Shaw, one that would raze your kingdom to the ground with all the secrets it’d unearth. All the people you destroyed from the inside out? They had lives. People they loved. People that loved them. That sort of vacuum doesn’t just go unnoticed, doesn’t dissipate over time. It just... _waits_ , to be filled back in. Waits for indemnification. Resolution. Retribution. What it really waits for, though – it waits for a _reckoning_. And one always comes, eventually.”

Charles’ gaze hardens into sharp steel, sharper than a razor’s edge. Shaw flinches when Charles leans forward, like he’s been cut.

“And this is yours,” Charles whispers.

He hears his words echo in the caverns of Shaw’s mind, bouncing from one nook to another, watches the fear that grows from them, blooming like a nasty weed, feels his deeply ingrained confidence shudder, wobbling dangerously near a precipice.

Ideal conditions for what he’s about to do, really.

Charles takes a breath and dives into Shaw’s mind.

-

Erik watches as Charles and Shaw’s eyes both shut halfway and go completely blank. It seems an awful lot like Charles has got Shaw under control, at least for the moment.

He turns to the Emma woman, who’s still hunched in on herself. She looks shell-shocked from whatever Charles did to her to shut her third eye. Looks like the perfect time to pick off another adversary, knock her out before she recovers, that sort of thing.

Erik charges, silently flitting up the stairs, and figures a good hit to the head will do.

He’s wrong.

Right as he’s about to wallop her into next year, her head whips up. Her eyes are icy and dark.

That’s the only warning Erik gets before she crinkles into diamonds and throws a solid fist right into his face.

-

Shaw’s mind is burning with shock, rage, fear, bloodlust, disgust.

Diving into it is like jumping into churning, freezing water. And Charles has never really liked swimming.

Charles shivers and draws a shield around himself, just tries to put something in between them, tries to keep all Shaw’s hatred from leaking in. Charles feels like if he let it, it could drown him. He morbidly wonders if Shaw’s already drowned in it, if a centuries old corpse with Shaw’s face is rotting somewhere at the bottom of this cold, cruel ocean.

Charles comes across Shaw’s embedded shields as he goes deeper, bypassing the immediate layers of consciousness and swarming emotions and heading into the murkier crevices of Shaw’s mind. The shields are psychic projections of fast, dangerous shoals – sharks, eels, killer whales, enormous jellyfish.

If one of these creatures wounds him in here, he’s never going to make it back to his body. For all intents and purposes, his body will be brain-dead. His consciousness will be stuck in Shaw’s head until this marina of psychic projections consume him and convert his psychic remains into extra energy.

Charles shudders.

It’s a fate worse than death, basically. If he had to make a list of the worst ways to go, this one would probably top the list. He can’t afford to make a single mistake here. He’s got to close in on where Shaw is hiding his essence so he can get what he came for and get out as soon as possible.

The best way to do that... He frowns, watching the nearest shark adjust itself as Charles drifts down another foot or so. It’s like a ripple of movement that goes through the rest of them, the further he goes. Blocking him.

They’re putting themselves between him and the essence.

Seems like a pretty fatal design flaw, but Charles isn’t complaining. Looks like all Charles has to do is go that way. And not get killed by marine life in the process, of course. Can’t forget that.

He puts up a hand and carefully constructs a few projections of his own.

-

Erik is kind of pissed off.

Up until he got slammed in the face, he’d thought this Emma lady was just some magician in Shaw’s coven, probably mindlessly greedy and idiotic with a thin streak of low cunning. He’d never given her a second glace.

It hadn’t even _occurred_ to him that she was actually a demon.

He can’t believe he didn’t see it before.

Well, to be fair, it has been a lifetime or five.

“Emma?” he asks incredulously as he dodges another hit. “You go by _Emma_ now? What happened to the ice queen who killed anything that called her less than a goddess?”

A cloud of hail bullets shoots his way. Erik rolls and tumbles out of the way at the last second, and they stab into a cement wall with a crunch.

“Really,” Erik says scornfully, drawing up a fireball in his hands and tossing it in her general direction. She blocks it with a cascade of ice. “You’re following Shaw around like his pet? Taking his orders?”

“I love him,” she says as she shoots icicles out of the floor like spears, straight towards his heart.

He shakes his head with a snort as he bats them away. “You’re a traitor to all of demonkind because you _love_ him, oh that changes everything, doesn’t it. You do know he kills and brainwashes us on the regular, don’t you?”

“I love him,” she repeats curtly. As if that makes everything else immaterial.

“What’s there to love, his sadistic, psychopathic megalomania?” Erik snaps. He sends a few molten cell bars her way. “Or maybe the handsome look on his face when he rips out a demon’s free will? Please. You’re not the Magno Cristallum Imperatrix I used to know, that’s for sure.”

She crinkles into diamond form again, grabbing the bars with her bare hands like they’re live snakes. The metal in her grip audibly cracks as a sheen of ice crawls up from under her fingers.

“I love him,” she says again, dispassionately.

Erik pauses.

Her eyes seem – odd. Glazed over. And her voice, it’s oddly flat. Almost robotic.

His brows knit together. That’s... not normal.

“I love him,” she says dully, like a broken record. “I love him, I love him, I love him – ” She it mutters over and over again, trying to slam him with a diamond fist with every phrase. It’s like she’s mindless, like she’s not even _there_ –

Erik’s eyes widen. A cold shiver runs down his spine that has nothing to do with the ice closing in on him. The demon in front of him isn’t Cristallum, she’s _Emma_ , she’s been taken over by Shaw and some mindless devotee was put into her head instead –

“You – ” he starts.

Then, before he can say anything else, probably because he’s frozen to the spot in shock and staring at her like a complete idiot, she hits him with some particularly nasty ice blades.

Right in his blind spot, too. How embarrassing. He looks like a fifty-year-old demon-child just starting out on his first hunt. It’s pathetic. He’s a professional, dammit. He has a reputation to maintain.

Erik tears the ice out of him with a sigh, cracks his neck to the side, and looks up at what’s left of Magno Crystallum Imperatrix.

“Right,” he says resignedly. Demons have had to fight each other under magicians’ spells for eons, but that doesn’t really make it any easier. “My move, I suppose.”

-

Charles watches Shaw’s sharks and stingrays and jellyfish struggle to escape from his weighted fishnets. They aren’t really very successful, due to Charles’ several projected octopi sealing the exits shut tight. Excellent.

Cue the whale – a blue whale, actually. The largest in the ocean. It’s enormous, blocking out the sun like it’s its own landmass, dipping down over Charles to swallow up all of his fishnets.

There’s a bit of a frenzy inside the nets when they see her gaping maw, but it doesn’t save them.

Charles reminds himself that one, these are not real creatures, they are just Shaw’s projections of creatures, and two, the blue whale doesn’t even eat these kinds of animals in real life. They mostly only eat krill and other copepods, so this particular whale would never have trapped them in her mouth at all had she not been a product of Charles’ imagination.

She snaps her jaw shut – it’s amazing, it causes such a ripple in the water, just that one small movement of hers – and the nets are gone. Completely out of sight.

The blue whale swallows, and that’s it, the projections collapse as they hit her stomach. He can feel it.

Charles lets out a sigh of relief. He can feel some psychic energy building up from absorbing all of them, maybe even two thirds of his full strength. Which is great.

Come to think of it... Charles disperses his whale projection. Honestly, he’s sad to see her go, but reabsorbing her brings him up to almost three fourths of his powers. It has to be done. Shaw’s going to be a hassle, he can tell. He’ll need everything he’s got.

“Now for the essence,” he says.

He follows the trail the projections unintentionally drew for him, deeper and deeper into Shaw’s dark, murky ocean.

-

Erik is pretty glad Charles turned off Crystallum’s third eye – she would have already torn him apart if he hadn’t.

As it is, she’s matching him pretty well. He does have the slight edge, thank hell, which means he can afford to avoid lethal attacks. For now. Better work that angle, make her angry and sloppy.

“And here, my dear demons, I give you Magno Crystallum Imperatrix,” Erik says drily as he shoots down another sheet of ice with a single stroke of magma. “A cautionary tale for any delusional demon-children that feel like they’re invincible.”

And he sears her arm with a vicious burn to cement the jibe.

As expected, she snaps and rushes at him like a wild animal.

“I _love him_ ,” she roars, Erik dodges, parries her fists –

“ _I love him_ ,” she screams hoarsely. “I _love him_ – ”

She swings at him again, but her form is getting slow and off-balance, just like Erik predicted.

“ _I love him_ – ”

Erik notices her voice is getting weaker, like her throat is raw. But that’s impossible, she’s in diamond form. He shakes it off and braces himself for another attack, she’s winding up her fist again, he’s going to retaliate with a fireball this time, make her retreat a bit –

Then Emma’s knees hit the charred and iced floor with an awful crunch.

Erik winces in sympathy, despite himself. Broken kneecaps are no laughing matter, even if you’re a demon. And she’s not even in diamond form anymore.

“I love him,” she whispers in a broken voice.

Her whole body is shaking, and her eyes are terrified.

Erik hesitates for a moment before stepping a bit closer to her. She doesn’t react. That’s a positive sign.

“ _I love him_ ,” she whispers again, like it’s an unfathomable curse. She stares at her shaking hands.

He steps closer, emboldened. Again, no response.

“I – ”

“Love him, yes, I know,” Erik says irritably. “So you’ve said.”

Her head whips up, and her eyes are electric when they burn into him. He can’t tell if she’s terrified, angry, or nervous. Honestly it’s probably a bit of everything.

Erik crosses his arms, uncomfortable with the sudden scrutiny. “You know, seeing as you repeated it over ten times in the past ten minutes. It seems to be the only thing you can say, in fact.”

“I – ”

“If you wouldn’t mind,” Erik says exasperatedly. “Please, stop saying that, it’s really getting quite annoying.”

She narrows her eyes into a glare.

“ – Don’t know who _he_ is,” she finishes pointedly.

Well, that’s unexpected.

“Um,” he says like the CEO mastermind he is. “I assumed you were talking about Shaw?”

She doesn’t look like that means anything to her. Her brow creases in confusion, in fact.

“Sebastian Shaw?” Erik tries. “Magician, bit of a murdering psychopath, ringing any bells? No?”

She shakes her head, frowning. “Who am I?” she asks. “I can’t even remember my name.”

Erik uncrosses his arms and straightens up. She goes quiet, watching him.

The _name_ – how could Erik not notice? Clearly Shaw had taken away her basic demonic identity through erasing her sacred name and replacing it with ‘Emma’. Now that he looks back, every time he’d said her true demonic name, she’d snapped more and more out of the Emma persona. If he can just keep waking her up from Shaw’s spell, maybe she can just... walk away from all this.

He’s got see how far he can push it, help her drag herself out of Shaw’s traps. This fight between them may be over already. Erik sure as hell hopes so.

He crouches down in front of her and looks her right in the eye.

“I have known you for centuries,” Erik says seriously. “Your sacred name is Magno Crystallum Imperatrix, and you have ruled the coldest circle of hell for millennia with a diamond fist.”

Saying her name has an immediate effect, now that he’s looking for it. Her eyes get a shade clearer, her spine straightens the tiniest bit, and her fingers shake a little less.

She’s remembering.

“You are Magno Crystallum Imperatrix,” Erik repeats firmly. “And you are stronger than anything Shaw could ever put inside your head.”

Her eyes don’t leave his face. Erik notices that her hands are completely steady now, and her expression has smoothed over.

“You are Magno Crystallum Imperatrix,” he says once more. “And you can do this, fight your way out. Your psychic abilities leave Shaw’s in the dust. Reclaim yourself.”

She nods sharply, just once, and closes her eyes.

Erik can see a white glow pulse underneath her eyelids as she goes to war with her own mind, and hopes to hell what he just said was true. Honestly, he has no idea how Shaw stacks up as a psychic.

Guess he’ll have to just wait and see.

-

Charles finally finds a small, locked box in one of the darkest crevices of the ocean floor. It isn’t anything like a treasure chest – it actually looks more like a cigar or cigarillo box.

It even has faded import stamps on it; one of them has an Italian crest that Charles vaguely recognizes. It’s a ridiculously expensive brand. Figures. Shaw is a smug, pretentious, ostentatious asshole, even in projected dreamspace.

He cuts the lock open with a swipe of his hand, and cracks open the lid.

Shaw’s essence.

Charles takes in a big breath, closes his eyes, and jumps in.

It takes the shape of a sterile lab.

Shaw is there, waiting for him with a serrated surgical knife and a snarl. He lunges for him, but Charles has quite a bit of psychic energy stored up now. He can make strong, manipulative projections, even in here.

Which means Shaw ends up strapped to his own surgical table – that he’s apparently had lying in wait for Charles, ugh – after quite an ugly struggle. Yes, there’s a few relatively unimportant laws of physics Charles (temporarily) breaks, some distracting illusions Charles pulls out of his sleeve where Shaw happily thinks he’s cutting Charles open, and there’s even a bit from a musical theater production, believe it or not.

It takes half of Charles’ batteries to do it, but he bloody does it. Shaw falls for everything. He spins around when gravity reverses, laughs hysterically when he stabs Charles’ illusion through the eyeball, and gets confused enough at the sudden production of Les Mis that he blinks stupidly at it. It’s so fast and so overwhelming – it all happens in about ten seconds – that Shaw is utterly defenseless.

Charles has just enough time to grab the knife, shove Shaw down on his own surgical table, and strap him in. He makes sure to gag him especially well with a dirty rag that must have been originally meant for Charles.

“There,” Charles says, satisfied. He turns away to study the lab Shaw’s chosen as his inner sanctum. “Now, let’s see... Where would you hide your memories?”

There are all sorts of drawers and shelves, full of odd and vaguely creepy things instead of the regular array of files and folders. Jars of eyes and fingers, that sort of distasteful thing. Charles grimaces.

Shaw’s trophies from his victims, no doubt.

Charles’s eyes pop all the way open.

Shaw wouldn’t actually store his memories in these... projected body parts, would he? Even he can’t be that disturbed. Right?

Charles sighs. Of course he would, the sick creep.

He grudgingly picks up a jar of eyes, ominously labeled _Fondest Memories_ , and screws it open.

He gingerly pokes at one of them, and suddenly –

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

his hands are meticulous,

cutting through her flesh like he would cut up a steak,

her flesh is going to taste _so good_ ,

maybe he’ll mix in some interesting spices this time,

perhaps a bit of sage?

 

 

 

 

 

 

– annnnnd he’s back in Shaw’s essence, one finger stuck in projected eye goop.

Wonderful. What an image to have seared into Charles’ brain forever. Just wonderful. Really.

And now, because he has to document these for the eventual indictment hearing and later the trial in open court, he’s going to subject himself to another ten or so. Great.

Charles pokes at another one, and, joy of all joys, he’s being sucked into another horrible memory –

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

it screams,

and the sound is like music to his ears, like a symphony.

He loves this part,

right when they break

and start begging for mercy that they know they’re not going to get,

he loves it

when he just digs through that wall

and shatters that stubbornness,

and he grins

as he plunges another illusion into its mind

making it relive one of its worst memories

over

and over

and

over again

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

– annnnnd Charles is back again, finger still unpleasantly wet and sticky from the eyeball.

He goes through the whole jar, just looking at a snippet from each one so he doesn’t go mad, and grudgingly copies them into his own memory banks as he goes. As expected, they are all horrifyingly inhumane. He finds Erik’s mother, Shaw’s memory of ripping her heart out, feels Shaw’s euphoria, and is especially disgusted. He shoves that particular memory into a ratty old torn up book and tosses it on the ground instead of putting it on the bookshelf with the others.

He’s glad he’s finally come to the last eyeball in the jar. He needs to just get this over with.

He taps it, and –

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

hie had a jdhhhr

dniiI and laughed at

the wuuuay she ns draggggAChd

but it waszssnt

tthhat CAKKir drummmahhhad anynthhinng to

giIiive him excepppt foor his

fuernccrrKKK annnnd

hiszszs zaz andrealllly he

rrhEERs breennnsjh

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

– and Charles gasps back into himself, mind spinning with confusion.

All the other memories had been easy to read – all Shaw’s thoughts were spelled out as clearly as the lines in a book. But this one was different, it was all high-pitched sounds and warps and bright lights. He couldn’t understand it at all, it was like a jarring, whirling kaleidoscope of sound and color.

It was almost... intentionally jumbled.

He turns to Shaw, who’s staring up at him with a strange gleam in his dead fish eyes. His thin mouth is stretched into a smile around his gag.

Charles narrows his eyes.

“You’ve done something to this one,” Charles says suspiciously. “Encrypted it. But not any of the others. Why?”

Shaw raises an eyebrow, and his smile stretches even more. His eyes flick to the gag in his mouth, then back up at him. Charles tightens his jaw. The last thing he wants to do is let Shaw speak, but what choice does he have? After a moment of weighing the pros and cons, he reluctantly pulls the rag out of Shaw’s mouth and lets it fall somewhere to his left.

“Tell me how to break the encryption,” Charles orders.

Shaw’s eyes are glittering with something dark and malicious, and his grin is stretching so wide he looks like a Cheshire cat. It’s raising the hairs on the back of Charles’ neck.

“If you have nothing to say, I’m stuffing the rag back in and leaving it there,” Charles snaps. “The encryption.”

There’s a pause, Shaw doesn’t cooperate, and Charles stoops to pick up the rag from where it landed on the floor.

“Really, Charles,” Shaw says silkily, before Charles has the chance to follow up on his threat. “What encryption?”

Charles is running out of patience with this awful excuse for a human being.

“The encryption you laid on it, so nobody can read it,” Charles says, clipped and slow, like he’s talking to a difficult child. “Now, tell me how to break it, or I’ll just work on breaking it myself. It’ll take a mite longer, but I’ll manage to crack it eventually.”

Shaw is still smirking up at him. His manner is really starting to get on Charles’ last nerve.

“There isn’t one,” Shaw says smugly. “Not on _my_ memory. Scan it, by all means. You’ll see that I’m telling the truth.”

Charles rolls his eyes, but he runs a routine scan over the eyeball in question for any protective or scrambling spells with a scrying glass, and it all turns up negative.

Charles frowns. “But – ”

Shaw tries to say something else with his forked silvertongue, but Charles doesn’t feel like humoring him again. So he stuffs the rag back in Shaw’s mouth and focuses on the problem at hand.

He’s _sure_ this memory is encrypted, it’s the only explanation for why Charles can’t make heads or tails of it. Could there even _be_ another explanation for –

 

_The star ain’t shinin’, don’t have no fire_

Charles blinks.

The words suddenly flared up in his mind like an inferno, straight from nowhere, blasting through anything he’d just been thinking about. Charles shakes his head and tries to refocus. Kalfu’s little prophecy, or whatever he called it, isn’t exactly relevant right now.

Where was he? What was he thinking about just now?

The encrypted memory, right, and how it –

 

_the shadow ain’t castin’, don’t have no soul_

Kalfu’s voice rumbles through all of his thoughts like a thunderstorm, like Kalfu imprinted Charles’ mind with the words just as he said them. Again, it throws Charles off.

Charles lets out a breath and tries to calm his skittering mind, tries to put all his scattered thoughts back in order. He can’t let this happen right now, he can’t be distracted and imprecise, he needs to break this encryption, copy the memory, and get out of here as soon as possible.

Right. The encryption, focus on that.

Charles furrows his brow. But the scrying glass proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was no encryption on the memory, so how did –

 

_But the little magic boy, the one who ain’t a quarter three,_

_don’t have no sister, mother, nor no bitter foe,_

Charles is getting a bit sick of this irritating and unsolicited poetry recitation feat. Kalfu that keeps on cutting through the thread of his thoughts. He’s going to give Kalfu a piece of his mind about it the next time he sees him, make no mistake. It’s incredibly ill-timed, and in the middle of a psychic connection, too!

It’s so loud, even _Shaw_ can probably hear it, echoing out of Charles’ mind and right into his. He glances over, and, yeah, Shaw looks properly confused and taken aback by the noise, his eyes flickering around searching for a source.

Charles growls in frustration, smacking his hands to his cheeks to snap himself out of it. Focus! He has to focus!

He just has to break the _encryption_ – the one that’s – uh –

 

_‘cept the dark little one clawin’ on him,_

_draggin’ him down to depths damned low._

The end of Kalfu’s prophecy reverberates through Charles mind, vibrating with meaning and purpose like the closing notes of a concerto’s finale fading into the silence of an auditorium.

It’s almost like... the words are passing through his mind, cleansing, searching, doing _something_ – what are they _doing_ –

Charles tries to follow them, and it’s like trying to keep up with a sprinting cheetah, he can sense it in the distance and tries to keep on its trail, deep into his own mind, deeper than he’d ever really gone –

Charles frowns.

He doesn’t recognize the part of his mind the waves of words are leading him into. It’s almost... _foreign_ to him. Like it... doesn’t belong to him. That’s awfully strange.

It’s sticking out like a rampaging djinn in a magic delicates shop, now that it’s out of the bag. He’s sure he would have seen this pocket of his mind right away, unless it was – hidden from him, on purpose.

That... has to be it. There’s no other explanation, really.

Something’s been stowed away down here, an entire section of Charles’ mind and memories, and he had no idea it even existed until now. A piece of him was locked away so he could never access it – and it looks like Kalfu’s words just showed him where it was hiding this whole time.

What was it that Shaw just said? About the encryptions?

Oh, yeah, he’d said –

Not on _my_ memory.

Charles sucks in a breath.

It’s not an encryption in _Shaw’s_ memory.

It’s an encryption in _Charles_.

-

The last twenty minutes or so haven’t been that exciting. Not on Erik’s end, anyway.

Charles and Shaw are standing there down the hall from him, doing nothing. And Crystallum Imperatrix is sitting across from him, also doing nothing.

He’s just sitting there, smoking a cigarette, absently checking his pocket watch every other minute, and waiting for something to happen.

He blows a smoke ring up into the air, and another, and another, until he’s made a tiny target design that floats up towards the ceiling. Then he lifts up a finger and shoots a tiny flame at it.

He hits the bullseye just as the smoke disperses.

Ugh, he hasn’t been this bored since that magician in 16thcentury London, the ridiculously paranoid one. She’d made him spy on all the neighbors to make sure they weren’t talking about her when she wasn’t around to hear it, and report back every word they said about this and that and the other thing. He’d sit there for hours, contemplating exactly how he would brutally murder each one of these neighbors if he could.

He takes another long drag from his cigarette, filling his lungs up with hot smoke that eases the bone-cold burn of this chilly human air. Not quite as effective as a nice long soak in volcanic magma, but it’ll do for now.

Erik wonders how long this is going to take.

He just wants to get this over with so he can go home with Charles and take a healing nap or something. Is that too much to ask? He’s been thrown around quite a bit already today, and the healing coma he needs is itching at the edges of his consciousness. The two volunteers broke the entrapment circle, like, ten minutes ago. Erik’s stuck waiting on these three until they can take off. Come on, psychics, hurry it up.

He flicks ash off the cherry as it burns down, and leans his back against the wall.

He’s contemplating the finer points of an argument against mayonnaise in roast beef sandwiches when something finally happens.

There’s a movement in the corner of his eye, and Erik’s head snaps up to follow it.

It’s Charles.

He’s backing away from Shaw, panting and looking a bit unsteady on his feet.

Erik stubs out his cigarette and swoops down the hall, grounding him with a hand on his back.

“All right?” Erik asks.

“More or less,” he replies, still sounding a bit breathless. “A sight better than _him_ , at least.”

Erik glances to Shaw, who looks particularly pissed off due to the fact that he currently can’t move his limbs, before refocusing on Charles.

“Right. Get what you wanted?”

Charles nods. “He’s going to go away for a long time. I have more than enough filed away to put him away for life, and I’m sure when he’s examined more thoroughly by law enforcement there’ll be even more to indict.”

“Good,” Erik says with a smirk. “And it looks like he’s not going to put up a fight on the way to impound, either.”

“No,” Charles agrees. “He won’t be able to, not until he’s properly secured and they decide to unlock him.”

Erik basks in the glow of Shaw’s utter humiliation and defeat.

Aah, revenge. So sweet.

Erik is completely caught up in the fact that Shaw is finally going to suffer like he should’ve centuries ago when he starts to feel a chill in the air, colder than the human world usually is.

It bites at his lungs, pushing him off of his little cloud nine.

He frowns and turns towards the side, and –

The entire cellblock is crackling with ice, snow is starting to fall even inside this closed underground space, and dangerously large icicles are dropping from the ceiling and rising up from the floor. And she’s standing there like an avenging fucking angel, body completely hardened into diamonds and head and mantle crowned with angry, icy spikes.

Looks like Magno Crystallum Imperatrix has risen again.

“Nice to see you looking like yourself again,” Erik says conversationally. He can see Charles shoot him an incredulous look, but he ignores it.

Crystallum Imperatrix just laughs, a high, ladylike giggle. “All thanks to you, Ignis Magnus Metalli,” she replies. “I will remember what you have done for me.”

Erik smirks. “I won’t let you forget it, either.”

Crystallum Imperatrix shakes her head with a wry grin. “You never have.” She looks back up, eyes catching on Shaw, and the temperature of the room drops another twenty degrees.

“ _Shaw_ ,” she grinds out.

Erik likes the look that that one word puts into Shaw’s beady little eyes.

“Emma, my dear,” Shaw says shakily.

'Emma' is completely stone-faced.

It makes Shaw laugh nervously.

“So glad to see you’ve recovered from this awful magician here shutting your third eye, darling,” he tries.

He fails.

Of course he does. Erik has seen Crystallum kill for much less.

She sneers, making Shaw visibly flinch backwards.

“It’s Magno Crystallum Imperatrix to you, you blood-sniffing _worm_ ,” she snarls, striding forward to make the kill.

Unfortunately, right then, Charles, the loveable idiot, puts himself in between her and Shaw with outstretched hands.

There’s a bit of a tense pause.

To put it lightly.

“Step aside,” she finally commands. “His life is mine.” Her eyes cut to Shaw with particular venom. “Or should I say, his _death_ is mine.”

Even though he looks a bit terrified, Charles stays right where he is.

Damn it.

Erik should have foreseen this.

Charles and his bleeding heart.

“I can’t let you do this,” Charles says apologetically. “I’m sorry, but I can’t stand and watch someone be executed.”

Erik nearly facepalms. Does he have a death-wish? “Charles, the man brainwashed her into loving him for who knows how long,” he points out wearily. “Who knows how many times he’s assaulted her sexually, how many people he’s made her kill, how many years she didn’t even known her own name and sacred identity.”

Charles bites his lip. Conflicted. Good sign.

“But...” Charles says reluctantly. “The rule of law? Legal justice?”

Seven hells.

Erik is _not_ going to fight the ice queen again. Not when she’s back to her full power, psychic abilities included.

He wants Charles and himself to actually _live_ , thank you very much.

He has to intervene somehow, cut this chat short. Thinking fast, Erik absentmindedly checks the time on his pocket watch.

“Well, would you look at that,” he says with a forced nonchalance. “Time to go, great to see you, Crystallum, really, it’s been lovely.”

She blinks at him. Then -

“Likewise,” she says with a growing smile, looking as satisfied as a cat with bowl of cream. Now she owes him a second favor, and she knows it.

“Wait, what?” Charles says, off put. “I – ”

“Not now, Charles,” Erik pleads as he grabs Charles’ arm and takes them back to the mansion just as Crystallum Imperatrix closes in on Shaw with a torrent of sharp, feral hail and the words: “See you in the coldest circle of hell, _darling_ – ”

They disapparate right on time. A second later, and one of those would have pierced right through Charles.

Erik knows Charles will be angry with him, and he understands that. He’ll have to apologize, explain that she would have quite literally cut through them to get to Shaw, how much she really deserved revenge because no court can account for and properly punish Shaw for his atrocities, all of that.

A cruel, sadistic part of him also knows Crystallum Imperatrix won’t let it end quickly.

The thought is incredibly satisfying.

Erik tamps down a smug grin as they pass through the Atlantic Ocean. Revenge for mother served, at last. And he has to say...

It was rather good served ice cold.


	10. Enigmas and Eurekas

When he and Erik rise up out of the mansion’s workroom floor together, Charles is stunned in place. The last thing he’d seen before apparating was an ice bullet flying right for the bridge of his nose. His eyes are still crossed, staring at that spot.

Then the grip on his arm carefully loosens and lets go. Erik’s radiating tension and a whole range of conflicting emotions. It’s keenly irritating to Charles’ sensitive mental shields, like a hundred small needles poking at his head.

“Stop that,” Charles grumbles, stepping away from him and gesturing in Erik’s general direction without looking at him at all. “You’re giving me a headache.”

“Sorry,” Erik mutters.

Really, that only makes it worse. Now Erik tastes like shame and guilt and self-hatred. It’s making Charles slightly nauseous. And it keeps getting stronger and stronger. Almost like it’s filling up Charles’ head.

“Ugh,” Charles says, pinching his nose. He closes his eyes and concentrates on patching up the holes in his mental shields.

And trying not to vomit.

“Look, I get it, you had to save us both, she would have killed us without a second thought, et cetera, it’s impossible to miss when you keep _blaring_ it on _full volume_ ,” Charles says tiredly. “Just – I’m really not up for all the yelling I want to do right now, all right, I’m going to have to take a rain check on that, yell at you about moral responsibility later, after I’ve had a good eight hours of sleep, thank you very much, and – and would you _stop it_ with that? It’s really getting quite irritating, I’m full up already, thanks.”

There’s a pique of surprise from Erik’s mind.

“Stop what?” Erik asks.

Charles frowns.

Erik’s surprise is pretty quiet, compared to everything else.

Surprise doesn’t feel like that, like it’s secondary. Surprise coats over other things like a bright orange finishing paint. It demands total attention and is impossible to miss. It’s always louder than any other thought.

So why is it so _quiet_?

Charles blinks.

That overwhelming, slowly building shame, guilt, self-hate – it’s not Erik’s. Well, some of that is Erik, it probably started off as Erik, but now –

Charles glances back in his mind, and yes, there it is –

It’s like there’s a leak in the dam, right where the encryption is, right in the darkest corner of his mind –

And it looks like whatever was hidden in it, that bloody uncomfortable, mysterious encryption’s secret memory, is spilling out right now, whether Charles likes it or not.

“Shit,” Charles swears emphatically right before he tumbles to the floor in a total psychic blackout.

-

He will deny it to the end of days, but Erik squawks like a chicken in surprise when Charles’ head thunks on the ground.

He stares at Charles’ limp body on the floor for a second.

“I... did not expect that,” he finally says. “...Charles?”

Charles doesn’t move a muscle. Even though both of his eyes are peeled open, staring at the far wall. Erik may not be a professional healer, but he’s pretty sure that isn’t a good sign.

“Seven hells, _Charles_ – ”

Erik rushes forward, but he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. They sort of awkwardly float a few inches away from the line of Charles’ body, dipping in before wheeling back again.

“Should I – steal a doctor?” Erik tries. “A psychic doctor? Is this a psychic thing?”

Charles, as expected, doesn’t respond.

Erik shoots up to his feet with a frustrated groan, and his arms spin like windmills. “What if it’s not a psychic thing, what if it’s a slow-acting curse, what if it’s some idiotic human illness, oh, hellfire, should I take him to a human hospital, or – ”

If this had happened a thousand years back, Erik would have just taken Charles to a few of his demon-sympathetic contacts on Earth to get a diagnosis. Unfortunately, they’re probably all dead by now. Erik frowns. Isn’t a thousand years when humans die? Or is it five hundred? He can never remember. Shaw’s seriously skewed his understanding of human life expectancy.

Anyway – it’s clear that Erik needs to do _something_. But he doesn’t know anyone except for Charles on this blasted dimension anymore –

His eyes narrow.

Well, he knows _one_ other person.

Hank screams shrilly when Erik’s hand grabs his ankle through his tiled floor and tugs him into Charles’ mansion. He thumps down into the workroom with a muffled ‘oof,’ and looks up at Erik fearfully in his fluffy bathrobe and crooked glasses.

“Oh my god, don’t kill me,” Hank pleads.

Erik rolls his eyes. “Don’t be so self-centered. Like I’d even waste my time.”

“Then why did you – ”

Erik jerks his head in Charles’ general direction.

Hank follows his line of sight, and practically jolts in recognition. He scuttles to Charles’ side on his knees, and turns Charles over so that he’s completely flat on his back. Hank moves a finger in front of Charles’ peeled eyes that are now staring unseeing at the ceiling. He also takes his pulse, listens to his breathing, checks the rigidity of his joints. Erik does not have a degree in medicine, but as far as he can tell, Hank’s basically... doing the sorts of things doctors do. And hopefully doing them well.

“Oh my god,” Hank blurts out after a tense minute or two. “He’s in psychic blackout.”

Erik has no idea what that means, but it sounds fairly serious. Just going by Hank’s frantic tone. And the ominous feeling he gets from the word ‘blackout.’ Even in a committee budget meeting, the word is practically an impending nightmare.

Hank looks back up at Erik with wide eyes, but doesn’t say anything else. As if he’s waiting on Erik for something. Erik crosses his arms uncomfortably before he frowns and nods, as if he learned all about psychic blackout thousands of years ago and Hank is only just catching up to his level right this moment.

“And?” Erik asks aggressively.

Hank splutters. “Well, I just – uh – ”

“Hurry up and fix him,” Erik snaps, masking his embarrassment behind over-the-top hostility. It’s incredibly effective, as techniques go. “Or maybe I’ll change my mind and decide to kill you after all.”

Hank jumps right to work.

-

Charles feels like he’s drowning.

All of these terrible emotions are flying around his head, clamoring to be heard, and he has no idea where they came from. Why they’re there. He’s overloaded, he’s got to calm this storm down and get to the memory somehow, he’s got to know what’s making him feel like this.

Because it’s clear to him, now that the encryption is gone, that it’s _his_ memory. Not someone else’s that’s been implanted. It’s a piece of _his_ mind. One that he’s been missing for a long time, over a decade.

Something someone didn’t want him to see. Someone powerful, clever, and definitely amoral.

At the moment Charles would bet the mansion on the culprit being Shaw, but that’s immaterial. What’s important is for Charles to wade through the hurricane of bottled up guilt and fear that’s got him completely at sea, pin down the hidden memory, and fully integrate it back into his psyche. That should clear all this up, in theory.

But he can’t, he _can’t_ – every time he tries to get a foothold, another torrent of self-hatred or panic slams into him and he’s unmoored again.

He screams out in frustration. How long is he going to be stuck like this, being battered around by his own mind?

Then someone grips him by the shoulders.

Charles stiffens in surprise.

“Hank?” he asks.

No one answers.

When he looks back, he doesn’t see anything, not a hand, not an arm, nothing. But he can _feel_ Hank’s steadying hands on his shoulders, and he can feel them slowly taking on more and more of the brunt of the terrible emotional backlash whirling around Charles’ brain. It’s like it’s... draining into Hank, trickle by trickle.

The storming seas start to calm, and Charles suddenly can find his footing.

“Oh,” Charles says, surprised. “That’s... thank you, Hank.”

Now that he’s able, Charles starts wading through the chaos of his mind, one foot in front of the other. He’s going to find the root of this whole mess, damn it, even if he has to sort through miles of this bloody psychic clutter.

-

Erik twists his hands together nervously, hovering over Charles and Hank like some sort of deeply concerned vulture.

“Well?” Erik asks anxiously. “Is it working? Taking effect? Healing? That sort of thing?”

Hank seems to be fighting off an exasperated sigh. “It’s going to take time,” he says with a strained voice, hands still firmly pressed to Charles’ shoulders and spell humming in the air. “You might as well go do something else, because this is going to take hours. And your anxiety is probably going to bleed into the spell once I go into a semi-trance, so.”

“Hmph, well,” Erik scoffs. “I knew that. I’ll just...”

His eyes land on the map, still laid out on the workroom floor. They follow the trail of marked cities.

“...Go to work,” Erik decides. He grabs the messenger bag with the pendulum in it – good thing Charles left it on the desk in plain sight so that even Erik could find it – and slings it over his shoulder. He hesitates for a moment before pulling out his pocket journal.

 _Charles_ , he writes. _Still have dozens of cities on the map, and we had a deal. I swear to you, I won’t come back until I find her._

He chews on the end of the pen, eyes narrowing on the last line of the page. He has space enough to write one more thing. He uncaps his pen, but the tip hovers over the paper for a minute before he decides exactly what he wants to say.

He finally writes down two simple words.

 _I’m sorry_.

He changes his mind about it twenty times, almost crosses it out, almost writes in something else, and stops himself at the last second. Finally he just leaves it as it is with a sigh and clamps the journal shut.

He turns back to Charles and Hank.

“When he wakes up, tell him to read the journal,” Erik orders.

“O... kay?” Hank says distractedly before he closes his eyes and triggers the beginning of his healing semi-trance. The markings and sigils and things he’d scribbled over Charles and up his own arms start to glow a bit blue.

“Right,” Erik says with a decisive nod. “I’ll... be going then.”

“See you later,” Hank says absently.

“Er, yes. Bye.” Erik flounders awkwardly for another couple of seconds, but Hank doesn’t say anything else. Neither does he.

Social interaction over.

Erik leaps up onto the steeple of a skyscraper somewhere in Europe, pulls out the pendulum, and gets to work.

-

Charles doesn’t quite know how it happens, it’s like he tripped and fell into it, but all of a sudden he’s in the mansion’s kitchen instead of wading through dark edges of his mind.

There are his hands, right in front of his face, making two sandwiches on their own with no input from him whatsoever.

It’s oddly similar to when – Charles’ eyes widen in realization – no, it’s _exactly like_ when he was in Erik’s old memory of his mother. This must be it – the memory someone desperately didn’t want him to see.

He looks a little closer, and yes, those are his hands, from over ten years ago. His fingers are so small they almost drop the jar of jam, and he has trouble reaching over the counter for two cups because he’s so short.

“Raven,” his mouth calls over his shoulder. “I’ve made sandwiches!”

“Sandwiches, again?” her voice complains.

His lips twitch up into a grin.

“Torture, isn’t it, having other people serve you food,” his mouth says glibly as his body turns around with both plates in hand.

Raven is grinning in the doorway with her arms crossed. “Shut up, rich boy,” she snaps, or tries to snap, anyway. It comes out as more of a strangled laugh.

Charles stares. If he was in control of his own tear ducts right now, he’d cry. There she is. Red hair, blue skin, white dress, wicked smile. Just as he saw her, right before she disappeared.

“What manners,” his mouth says with an air of severe disappointment, in the most posh British accent he can muster. “What would high society think of _that_ , young lady?”

She giggles, and springs into her normal seat at the kitchen table as he sets down their food.

“High society would fawn over me,” Raven says decidedly, picking up her sandwich and biting a huge chunk out of it. “They’re a bunch of boring old rich people, they’d love to have someone like me around to spice things up.”

Charles grins. “English high society wouldn’t even know what to do with you. They’d be torn between throwing you out and crowning you queen.”

“Ha! They’d crown me,” Raven says smugly with her mouth full of bread. “I wouldn’t settle for anything less.”

Charles raises an eyebrow. “First step to getting crowned queen – don’t talk with your mouth full. They only allow people with good table manners to become English royalty.”

“Really? Good to know,” Raven says thoughtfully, with three bites of her meal still in her mouth. “Once I become queen, that’ll be outlawed. Everyone in the kingdom will have to eat with their mouths full of food at all meals, or they’ll be executed.”

Charles snorts into his food.

“Good luck with that,” he says. “Can you imagine Mother’s face at the coronation feast?”

They both dissolve into giggles at that.

There’s a creak in the wooden floors, a few rooms away.

Charles looks up and his laugh falters – he can hear the sound of heavy footsteps in the hallway, now. And they’re getting louder. A streak of fear shoots through him; it has to be one of his parents. The staff isn’t due until tomorrow morning.

Raven’s eyes suddenly go sharp and dart to the side, and her human disguise quickly folds over her body. They both descend into silence, listening and alert.

The footsteps stop with a squelch right outside the kitchen door.

Confusion shoots through past-Charles’s mind at the odd sound. Neither of his parents would ever let their shoes to get soaked, even in a flash flood. They would certainly never get all that water all over the polished floors. Present-Charles, on the other hand, is filled with a sudden dawning horror. He knows that those feet can’t be soaked with water – it’s not even raining outside, it’s sunny and bright.

No, they’re soaked with blood.

When he looks down, yes, there’s a thin stretch of red trickling past the gap in the door.

The sight shuts down Charles’ young mind with fear, and his eyes look to Raven. She’s practically crackling with tension, attention completely fixed on the door.

There’s another squelching sound, like the heel of a boot turning through sludge. Turning towards _them_. And then the doorknob starts to turn with a familiar squeak.

Charles’ heart is hammering in his chest.

Then the door is open, and his eyes are caught on the shoes swallowed up in the dark red puddle of blood and gore. His eyes follow the trail of blood, past the stained slacks and the shirt that still have small patches of pure white where the red isn’t dripping, and finally up to the smiling face.

Even his smile is bloody.

“Evening,” Shaw says pleasantly in that terrifying way of his. His eyes aren’t human – they’re more like a mad dog’s eyes than a man’s.

He takes a step, only one step that gets him just past the doorway, but it feels like he’s lunged right into their space. Charles and Raven both tense, freeze in place, and Charles can feel his hackles rise all the way up.

Then Shaw takes a languid couple of steps forward, into the kitchen, right past their kitchen table and to the sink.

Charles doesn’t dare look behind him. He hears the faucet sputter on, and the water hit the stainless steel.

“More of a mess than I thought,” Shaw says, almost apologetically. Charles can hear him scrubbing his hands together. “Really didn’t expect that much of a fight, from what I’d heard about your mother. Blood got absolutely everywhere, in the end. What a mess.”

The faucet stops running, shuts off, and Charles hears the whisper of one of the hand towels slipping off its cabinet hook.

Shaw steps back into Charles’ line of sight with his shoes still squelching on the floor, rubbing the towel over his face like it’s a linen napkin. He sits down at the kitchen table with them, carelessly tossing the bloodstained rag onto the table in a heap.

“I’ll have a man come by and clean it all up later,” he remarks, as if he’s talking about wine spills in the carpet instead of pints of blood. “Anyway, to business.”

He leans in with that unnerving grin of his, folding his hands together on the table like a priest about to start prayers at dinner. It makes Charles reflexively jerk backwards in fear, to keep more space between them.

Shaw chuckles at that.

“Now, now,” he says to Charles in a comforting voice. Charles has never been less comforted in his life. “Let’s stay calm, shall we, little Charles Xavier?”

Then he turns to Raven.

“And his dear sister, too.” Shaw’s horrifying grin stretches wider across his gaunt face as his mad eyes flicker over to her. “Or, should I say, his dear _changeling_ sister. Isn’t that right, Mystica?”

Charles risks a brief glance at Raven. Her mouth is drawn tight and her eyes are on fire, but her face is stony and carefully held still. Like she doesn’t want to reveal anything.

“Now here’s what’s going to happen,” Shaw continues conversationally. “I’m going to give you a choice. Either I finally get to rip _your_ heart out without a fuss – ” He points to Raven’s chest. “ – or I kill your dear brother Charles right here at the kitchen table and eat _his_ instead.”

Charles’ throat clicks as he tries to swallow down a sudden wave of nausea. His shoulders are beginning to shake uncontrollably.

“But that’s not all,” Shaw says delightedly, wagging a finger. “You both have a time limit.”

He must see Raven’s eyes narrow, in fact he must have been waiting for it, because he continues with a laugh, “Of course! Neither of you have realized it yet.” He claps his hands together in glee. “You see, you’re both currently under the influence of a deteriorating memory curse.”

Raven’s jaw visibly tightens.

“Yes, isn’t it genius?” Shaw says. “In another ten minutes, Charles won’t remember anything about himself. That is, if he’s still alive. And you, Mystica? You won’t even remember your own sacred name.”

Charles and Raven meet eyes for a moment. He can see the terror there, even though she tries to hide it.

“So, that means if you choose _not_ to fight it, Mystica, Charles won’t remember watching you die, and he gets to live in peace. I might even accept him as an apprentice in five or ten years if he practices his magic,” Shaw says pleasantly. “And Charles, if she does decide to put up a fuss... Well.”

Shaw shrugs a bit regretfully. “In her last few minutes before she’s wiped of her identity, she’ll see her brother’s heart eaten. And after that, she’ll come with us peacefully anyway.”

Charles struggles to wrap his head around this monster of a man. He honestly doubts he’ll ever come to understand him.

“Why are you – ” Charles’ mouth blurts out, before he cringes back in fear.

“Why indeed,” Shaw says, peering down at him. “Well, little Charles, your changeling sister Mystica’s heart is not only very tasty – it also happens to be quite the elixir. Do you know what an elixir is?”

He suddenly sounds oddly similar to Charles’ teachers at school. It’s disorienting.

Shaw seems to actually be waiting for an answer, so Charles finally licks his lips and timidly says, “Yes.”

“And what is it?” Shaw inquires.

“A potion used to change the age of microscopic living organisms and the chemical compounds of minerals,” Charles recites obediently.

“Correct!” Shaw says with a proud smile. “Well, Charles, with this particular elixir, one of the essential ingredients is a beating heart. Every beat that heart would have taken in life goes straight to mine instead.”

He nods his head over at Raven. “So tell me, Charles, why would I rather have your sister’s heart, when I could just take yours?”

Charles never wants to take another magician’s course again. If he’s even alive after this. “Because her heart would last longer than mine.”

“Right _again_ , my dear boy!” Shaw says. “Human hearts usually only last me a few decades, seventy years at most. They make do for a time, but demon hearts last me much, much longer. There are other reasons, too, of course – there’s a colleague who wants a sample of your sister’s DNA, for example. But that’s irrelevant at the moment.”

He lays back in his kitchen chair, glancing from Charles to Raven with a particularly sunny smile. “So, what will it be, Mystica? You only have – ” he checks his watch. “ – seven minutes left, according to my watch.”

Charles looks at her helplessly, pleading with his eyes for her to make this whole thing just... go away somehow.

She visibly steels herself, drawing in a long breath, and finally says, “It’s going to be all right, Charles.”

He doesn’t understand – she _can’t_ be saying that she’s going to –

“I’m so glad we’re being so reasonable about this,” Shaw says. He stands and takes a few steps over to her. “Right, just stay perfectly still, and I’ll – ”

It happens so quickly that Charles barely sees it.

Raven explodes into her normal blue self and leaps out of the chair towards Shaw. There’s a lightning-quick struggle Charles can’t follow. There’s blood sprayed on the table, and there are awful thuds that make Charles wince. The kitchen table cracks in half, though Charles can’t actually see how it happened.

Shaw snarls like an animal and aims his fist at Raven’s chest. She tucks her arm in front of it at the last second, and he blasts a hole in it. Raven screams in pain before she twists at an impossible angle and breaks Shaw’s neck with her legs. His body slumps to the ground, his neck twisted horribly, and twitches from head to toe. Not a second after he goes down, Raven dashes for the window. She rolls through it, crashing through the glass and gracefully landing on the ground on both feet.

“That’s not going to hold him off for long, Charles,” she yells back at him as she runs off into the mansion’s grounds. “He’ll come back! Don’t try to find me, it’ll keep you alive!”

Charles stares after her, speechless.

He looks back down at Shaw’s neck, which is beginning to unfurl and straighten out. Charles’ eyes widen. He’s actually coming back to life. Right in front of him.

Charles scrabbles for a pencil, a pen, a piece of paper, anything – he has to write down what Raven told him before he forgets everything. Quick, quick, quick –

He grabs a page out of one of the staff timestamps by the stove and scribbles over it with one of the pens from the silverware drawer – _don’t look for_ –

There’s a noise from the floor behind him. It sounds awfully like a groan.

“Really, that was quite rude of her,” says Shaw. There’s a loud cracking noise, presumably as his neck snaps completely back to normal.

Charles feels Shaw’s large hand clamp down on his shoulder.

“What are we up to, little Charles Xavier?” he asks in a syrupy voice. He bends over and reads what Charles has written. “Oh, dear – can’t have that, can we? No, no, no.”

Shaw snatches up the timecard and rips it into tiny pieces. Charles watches the shreds flutter down to the kitchen counter as a dull dread takes him over.

“You’re going to look for her, Charles, whether you like it or not. In fact, I’m going to make it your life’s mission. A few implanted memories here, a few sensors there – you’ll find her for me in no time, I’m sure. I’m a reasonable man; I can wait a decade for a few thousand years of elixir.”

Charles looks over his shoulder into Shaw’s sharp smiling teeth.

He doesn’t think he’s seen anything quite so terrifying.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charles starts awake on the floor of the workroom with a shout.

Hank is there, holding onto his shoulders and blinking out of a semi-trance with blue smudges on his face, and he rears back with a shout of his own. Charles can hear him fall over in an awkward flop, and the muffled ‘oh my god ow’ that tumbles out of his mouth.

Charles closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. He waits until the image of Shaw’s smile seared into his mind dissipates, then sits up.

“...You okay?” Hank asks tentatively.

“Bit of a headache,” Charles mutters. “Other than that, fine. No psychic complications.”

Charles rubs at his eyes and folds into himself.

“Not what I meant,” Charles thinks he hears Hank mumble. Before he can respond, Hank steamrolls onwards. “So what did you see, and whose memory was it?”

Charles stares at his shoes. “It was my memory, from a long time ago. How Raven... went missing.”

Hank is quiet for a second.

“Do you know who put the encryption on it?”

Charles smiles humorlessly. “Oh, yes. Our late Sebastian Shaw.”

“Oh.” Charles can feel Hank’s wince. “Um... So... Did he encrypt it so you wouldn’t be able to find her?”

Charles snorts. “Exactly the opposite.”

He doesn’t elaborate. He just rolls to his feet and shakes out the pins and needles in his toes.

“Well, uhm, well then.” Hank coughs awkwardly. “Okay.”

“I did get a bit more context,” he says and glances over his shoulder. “Details which you may understand better than I do, Eri – ”

Charles stops for a second. Erik isn’t behind him. He has to spin in a complete circle just to be sure. Nope. Still no Erik. There’s no Erik or any other demon in the room, as far as he can tell.

He furrows his brow. “Where’s Magnus?”

Hank scratches at the back of his head. “You mean, uh, the demon guy, right? He went somewhere after he grabbed me, he said to... read the journal? Whatever that means.”

“Huh,” Charles says thoughtfully. He grabs his journal out of his pocket and flips through it. “I wonder what he – ”

He stills when he hits the right page and reads what Erik’s written there.

He reads it again. And again. And for a third time, just for good measure.

“‘I swear to you, I won’t come back until I find her,’” he reads out loud. Charles sighs. “Erik, you bastard. How am I supposed to yell at you now?”

-

At that very moment, an enormous explosion goes off in a laboratory in South America.

It destroys the building, but more importantly, it destroys everything those creepy magicians had been up to.

Erik shakes his head in disgust. After circling the list of cities across the globe over fifty times, he was bound to notice some of the other things going on in these shady, illegal labs. And he was just as bound to get pissed off and decide to destroy them once he did.

Because really. Splicing live people together? That’s just tacky. Charles would never approve.

He’s been destroying labs and things all day, after he combs through them for any more signs of Raven and comes up with nothing. He’s probably taken down at least twenty-five shady coven organizations by now, actually. It feels kind of good, like he’s been slightly productive, but it isn’t really enough.

Because, unfortunately, he’s still got nothing to show Charles.

He’s gone through _every single city_ that was on the list, even a few cities that weren’t, and none of them had anything more than a DNA sample or two hidden deep in a lab. Erik is going to end up tearing out his own horns in frustration if every search in every city on Earth turns up blank like this.

Wait a minute.

“ _Oh_!” Erik smacks himself in the forehead. “I _haven’t_ checked every city on the list yet. There’s one more to go.”

Erik flaps his wings and flies straight back to Westchester, New York.

“Can’t believe I missed it,” he grumbles to himself as he dodges some buildings and a flock of birds. “And now that I’ve sworn never to return until I’ve found her, it’s going to be awkward when I just show up. Hell, what is Charles going to think? Ugh. Stupid, stupid, stupid – ”

He coasts down out of the clouds and lands in Charles’ workroom, stalking angrily towards the desk and tossing the messenger bag on top of it. “ – _Idiot_ demon, why don’t you think things out a little more before just swearing on this and that, next time, h – ”

Erik abruptly cuts off when he realizes that Charles and Hank are standing right there.

In the room.

With him.

Right there.

“ – ellooooo,” Erik trails off. “Charles... Other one.”

“Hank,” the other one pipes up.

“Whatever,” Erik dismisses.

He dares a short glance up at Charles, but his face seems eerily blank. His gaze returns to the floor. It’s a nice floor. Clean. Well taken care of. Smooth. Level. Oh, shut up and talk to him, Erik, you damn bloodsniffer.

“Charles, I’m – ” Erik starts.

“I read what you wrote,” Charles says. His voice sounds carefully neutral. Every word hits Erik like a freight train. He would know, he’s personally been hit by at least six of the damn things.

Erik fumbles around for something he wants to say, _needs_ to say, but he’s having trouble pinning it down. “I’m – Charles, I – I haven’t give up, I’m not breaking my oath, well, I mean, I’m here, but, erm, I’m – ”

He glances up again, but Charles’ face is impossible to decode. It’s completely expressionless.

“ – Okay, I’m shutting up now.”

Again, the floor is a marvelous floor. As expected, really, as someone like Charles wouldn’t settle for a floor that was anything less than marvelous. Because everything about Charles is marvelous. Yes. Where was he again? Ah, yes. Shutting up.

His thumbs fidget behind his back as he keeps his mouth tightly clamped.

Charles sighs heavily. “So, then, why _are_ you – ”

“Icouldn’tfindher,” Erik blurts out.

He winces. That could have come out better. He could have at least waited until after Charles was finished asking his question. Since he’s already started talking, though, he may as well finish. Erik gamely continues digging himself into a deeper hole.

“I went through every city on the list over twenty times, and there was no sign of her except for small DNA samples I found in coven laboratories,” Erik explains to the marvelous, smooth, and level workroom floor. “I combed through every single one of them, but I couldn’t find her anywhere, and then I remembered, oh yes, Charles said we should cross Westchester off the list, because we already have DNA of hers here that you’ve collected, so I figured I might as well look here a few times before going back and searching every square inch of the planet for her – ”

“She could be _here_?” Charles exclaims. “Oh my god, I didn’t think – Where’s the pendulum?”

Erik swings around and dashes over to the desk, grabbing up the messenger bag and digging through it. “I’ve got it, right here – ”

Charles grabs it from him. “ _Ostende mihi_!” he says wildly, and the pendulum swings to the side. Charles rushes after the trail out of the workroom and into the hallway.

Erik and Hank blink at each other for a moment before running after him.

-

Charles tears down hallway after hallway, leaps up the stairway to the ground floor, heart rabbiting at three times its normal pace. He’s starting to wish he’d done a bit more exercise during his lifelong search, especially when a cramp mercilessly stabs into his side.

He keeps his eyes fixed on the pendulum pointing the way, not letting the burn in his legs and lungs deter him at all, and ultimately skids to a stop outside the kitchen.

The very same kitchen where Shaw – well, it doesn’t matter now, Charles supposes. Shaw is dead.

He takes a ragged breath, and he can feel his heartbeat thundering in his ears. He lifts a hand to the doorknob cautiously, and finally, quietly, turns it.

The kitchen door squeaks open with the same jerky creak it’s always had. He takes a step in, eyes cataloguing every slant and crevice in the room.

It looks the same as ever.

Table, chairs, cabinets, dirty plates in the sink, icebox tucked away in the corner, sun shining through the windows, cat nibbling at her bowl of food, birds chirping outside. It’s so... normal.

He feels more than hears when Erik and Hank catch up to him.

“Anything?” Erik asks urgently.

Charles doesn’t answer, staring at the line of the pendulum. It seems to be pointing into the cabinets behind the cat bowl.

He takes a few steps forward, and the direction doesn’t shift at all. Oh, god. He walks right up to it and crouches down.

Charles holds his breath, and reaches for the handle –

“Rrrowww,” Mico greets, rubbing at Charles’ leg with her head affectionately and knocking his hand out of the way.

Charles huffs out a frustrated sigh. “Mico,” he says severely. “Please, I don’t mean to be rude, but I am currently otherwise engaged.”

He nudges her out of the way, which mortally offends her feline sensibilities. She sniffs, absolutely affronted, and stalks off with her nose turned up to the ceiling and her fur as prickly as a live wire.

Charles shakes his head. He’ll make it up to her later. Maybe with fresh fish or something equally delectable. He reaches for the cabinet’s handle again.

But right before he can swing it open –

Erik’s mind spikes in surprise, and he says with a tinge of awe –

“Charles, the _pendulum_ – ”

What about it? Charles looks down.

To his amazement, the pendulum isn’t pointing to the cabinet anymore.

It’s – it’s _moved_ , how is that possible – what is it even _pointing_ at –

Charles dumbly turns his head around to follow the new path, which is still moving bit by bit. Shifting, tiny degree by tiny degree.

Charles jolts up onto his feet, and walks unsteadily to the kitchen door. Hank and Erik part to let him pass, and he finds himself standing dumbstruck in the middle of the hallway.

The pendulum is swaying with every tiny, regal step that Mico makes.

It’s –

It can’t be.

Raven is –

 _Mico_ is –

Charles goes a bit lightheaded, wobbling on his feet.

He _remembers_ the day Mico had limped up to the mansion, remembers it like he remembers how to draw a Sigillum Dei, and how the poor cat had had matted, bloody fur, a horribly maimed leg, and he remembers how she’d flinched from every sound and movement around her, how she had seemed so confused and afraid and _hurt_ –

“Oh,” Charles voice breaks. “Oh, _oh_ – ”

The pendulum clatters when it hits the hallway floor.

“ _Mico_ – ” Charles chokes out through the sudden lump in his throat, and he’s rushing forward, right towards Mico – who’s not Mico at all, but _Raven_ –

He’s got tears pricking at the corners of his eyes when he finally snatches Mico up from the ground and pulls her right to his chest in a tight hug. He ignores her loud objections and runs a gentle hand through her soft fur.

She grumbles a bit, but surrenders and relaxes in his arms.

“Oh, god,” Charles says with a shaky voice. “Oh my god, _Raven_ – ”

He cuts himself off with a sob, and ducks his head into her beautiful fur.

He can feel an uncontrollable happiness bubbling up inside him, and a smile breaks on his face.

“She doesn’t remember,” he finally says with a scratchy voice. “She doesn’t even know who she is, Shaw erased her sacred name, but she’s _here_ – ”

“Say it,” Erik urges. “Say it, say her sacred name, keep saying it, she’ll start to remember herself.”

Charles pulls back his head and stares into Mico’s distinctly unimpressed eyes.

“Mystica,” he says firmly. “ _Mystica_.”

There’s a spark of recognition that lights up in Mico’s wide eyes, and Charles knows right this moment that everything is going to turn out all right.

He grins and says it again. And again. And again.

Two hundred seventy three ‘Mystica’s’ later, Mico’s eyes glow gold and her fur shivers into a familiar bright blue.

-

Erik watches Charles and Hank fuss and putter around Raven’s bed, where she’s sleeping like the dead. Apparently relearning your sacred identity after a decade of living as a cat wipes you out for a bit.

There’s a sad, almost nostalgic smile sitting on Erik’s face.

Charles doesn’t need him anymore.

Erik has already killed Shaw. And Charles has found his sister. There’s nothing else to continue their professional relationship – the needs of their contract have all been met. Soon enough, he’ll send Erik back to hell and that will be that. There will be no more summonings, no more afternoon tea, no more teasing conversations.

There’s a dull, painful pang in Erik’s demonic essence.

No more Charles.

It’s a shame his proposal won’t ever see the light of day. Erik lets out a quiet sigh through his nose glumly. Perhaps Acidia could make use of it. Someone should, and the Felis demon seems quite the fit for her.

Erik watches Charles whisper furiously with Hank over proper treatment for recovering amnesiacs and remembers the cold, biting look in Charles’ eyes from less than an hour ago. The cutting way he spat the words ‘ _I read what you wrote_ ’ at Erik, like the very thought of him was disgusting.

While it lasted, when Charles looked at Erik like he’d hung the moon and pulled up the mountains, Erik had been the happiest he’d ever been in his whole eternal life. Even though it was over so soon, so fast... it feels like it was worth it. This one week, Erik will remember forever. Remember how he smiled at him, how he made him feel.

And, of course, Erik will never forget how much he’s in love with him.

Ten thousand, a hundred thousand years from now, Erik will love him. The stars will eventually burn out and the universe will crumble, and Erik will still be hopelessly, wildly in love with Charles Xavier, Mage Doctor.

Erik’s eyes shutter as he looks on, taking one long last look at Charles’ profile and his blue, blue eyes.

Then he turns away, steps down the hall.

He wants to leave when the last memory of Charles he has is... happy. He doesn’t want Charles’ face looking at him coldly, with obvious distaste, with a carefully polite expression tacked on top of it. He wants to hold that image with him for the rest of forever – Charles sitting at Raven’s bedside, adorned by sunlight, gazing down with his blue eyes, at peace.

It’s enough.

Erik is sinking into the floor and back into hell when Charles snaps, “And _where_ exactly are _you_ going?”

Erik closes his eyes. He took too long. With a deep sigh, he lifts back out of the floor. He pastes a cocky smile on his face and turns back to look Charles in the eye.

“Well, it’s been fun, Charles, but I suppose it’s time for me to go back to hell and make a day of it. Board meetings, paperwork, that sort of thing.” He waves a hand with feigned condescension. “Maybe I’ll come around to this dimension in another millennia or two. Have a nice rest of your life, I suppose.”

There’s a frozen moment in time where Erik finishes his sentence and sees the look in Charles’ eyes, a icy, furious look that cuts into him and makes him falter. It’s also the exact moment when his heart breaks into sharp little pieces.

Charles is quiet. Too quiet. Erik breaks eye contact. He can’t hold it anymore. It hurts too much to see Charles angry at him. Hating him.

“I see,” Charles says tightly.

At that, Erik whips up his head with wide, fearful eyes.

Charles isn’t even looking at him. He just presses his finger into his palm and says, “Vispilio? Are you there?”

“Yes, hello!” Vispilio responds almost instantly. “I’m still relocating some of our newfound friends. Did you need me?”

“Only for a moment,” Charles says.

“Okay! I’ll be there in a minute!”

“Thank you.” Charles turns to Hank. “Vispilio will take you home. Just give zher the address or coordinates.”

“Uh,” Hank says as he glances furtively between Charles and Erik like they’re in the middle of a horrible car crash of a tennis match. “Okay.”

Vispilio pops up, says hello, and whisks Hank back to his partially destroyed lab in Illinois.

The last thin shield between Erik and Charles’ almighty oncoming wrath has just disappeared.

Erik closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, straightens his back, and accepts his fate. Whatever Charles decides it to be, he’ll accept it.

“Erik,” Charles says severely. “Let me be clear.”

Erik peeks an eye open before snapping it shut again. He doesn’t want to see Charles face when he says... well, whatever he’s about to say.

“You let Crystallum Imperatrix kill Shaw,” Charles says coolly. Erik flinches. “I’m not going to just forget that. And you triggered my psychic blackout. And you kidnapped Hank.”

Erik bites his lip to keep himself from speaking in his own defense. It’s over, he’s told Charles everything already, there’s nothing left for him to say. If Charles thinks he should be told off, then he deserves this. He deserves every word.

“You _also_ ,” Charles continues on as Erik sinks into dread. “Saved my life when I was being irrational and putting myself right in the line of fire.”

Erik blinks.

What?

“And it wasn’t your fault I went into blackout, really, it was Shaw’s. You just unknowingly broke the seal on the encryption. It could have happened at any time, which is actually quite dangerous if it happens without anyone else around to medically assist. And then you saved my life a _second_ time by stealing Hank over here and having him help me out of it.”

Erik looks up at Charles, trying to decipher the look on his face. He can’t possibly be saying what Erik thinks he’s saying – can he?

“And yes, I am still a bit angry at you for some things,” Charles concedes. “But Erik – you’ve just flown around the world who knows how many times searching every nook and cranny for my sister, swearing to never return until she’s found, then you come back here _despite your oath_ just to keep looking for her, and after that you planned to scour every square inch of the _planet_ – but you didn’t have to in the end, because you actually put the pieces together and helped me find her right here in the mansion. You _found Raven_. And, to top it all off, after all of this, all the things you’ve done for me, you still think I’m capable of _hating_ you?” Charles scoffs. “Please.”

He darts forward and catches an extremely stunned Erik in an unexpected hug.

“I could never hate you,” Charles whispers into Erik’s shoulder.

Honestly, if Erik were to die right now, he would die the happiest demon on any dimension.

He carefully brings up his arms and gingerly clasps them around Charles. He doesn’t want to mess this up – honestly, Erik _could_ probably mess this up somehow, no matter how simple the concept of a ‘hug’ may initially seem. He hasn’t been hugged by anyone since he was going by the name Max, so he hasn’t exactly had a lot of practice.

“Charles,” Erik sighs out with no small amount of relief flooding through him. He loves him so much, it’s practically physically squeezing at his heart – and now there’s a tiny scrap of hope. “Seven hells.”

Charles hugs him a little tighter, like he’s trying to hold on, before he lets go and steps backwards. The corner of his mouth is turned up, Erik notices. Good. So the hug didn’t end because of something Erik did wrong. Excellent.

Charles just looks at him, with a faint smile curling onto his face.

Even though he’s perfectly aware of their color already, Erik is once again struck by how _blue_ Charles’ eyes are. Reminds him of coasting through the upper atmospheres as the sun rises – a clear, piercing blue that runs endlessly deep. He could get lost, looking into Charles’ eyes like this.

Then Charles cocks his head to the side and says some words that Erik doesn’t quite catch, and Erik realizes that – oops – it looks like he just _did_ get lost in them.

He shakes his head a bit to give the stupid a chance to fall out. “Sorry, er, I didn’t catch that. What did you say?”

Charles’ smile turns smug.

“I _said_ ,” he repeats playfully. “That you’re _blushing_.”

Erik’s hand flies up to his own face, and, yep. His face is burning a horrible purple. It’s so bright, purple is even reflecting back onto his hand.

“Oh, _god_ ,” Erik swears, absolutely mortified. Unfortunately, that only makes his blush worse.

He plants his face in his palm, even though it does no good. Charles has already seen it – he’s even started _sniggering_. Erik has lost all semblance of dignity. Demonkind has fallen this day, in the eyes of all the universe.

Charles’ snigger ratchets up into a full laugh. Erik turns around and vainly tries to stop his ill-timed blush through pure willpower. He knows Charles can still see the tips of his ears burning purple. It doesn’t help.

“Erik – ”

“I am _not blushing_ ,” Erik says sternly. It’s a statement that probably would’ve sounded more aggressive and believable if his voice hadn’t cracked halfway through it.

He points at Charles commandingly with a clawed finger. He can still feel heat on his cheeks. “ _Not. Blushing_.”

Charles raises his hands in surrender. “Fine, fine, you weren’t blushing, and nobody hugged you unexpectedly,” he says, slightly patronizingly.

“Right,” Erik says, mollified. “Yes. That.”

He pinches his nose and looks up at the ceiling. Begone, blush, he thinks to himself with particular venom. Begone, foul purple apparition.

Charles snorts, and Erik feels it brush across him. Erik blinks and looks down – Charles is much, much closer than he was just a second ago.

 _Much_ closer.

Why is he so close? He’s _so close_. His eyes are mesmerizing, Erik can feel himself falling into a trance just from watching them.

One of Charles’ eyebrows raises up.

“Erik?”

“Yeah?” Erik responds breathlessly, eyes caught now onto Charles’ red, red lips.

“You do remember, don’t you,” Charles murmurs into his mouth. “I do happen to be a psychic now, you know. Mind-reader, that sort of thing.”

“Hmm, I do know.”

A moment later, Erik’s eyes pop open, as wide as they can go.

“Oh, hell,” Erik says. He has no illusions about the fact that his entire face has most likely gone an awful dark eggplant color. “You – you heard?”

Charles grins. “Which part?”

Erik’s a bit thunderstruck. It’s like his entire mind has gone blank. Any thoughts he may have had going on have been blasted out of his head, except for a sudden screeching fear.

Charles’ eyes soften. “The answer is yes, by the way.”

That... The answer is yes?

Erik fumbles with that for a bit, but can’t quite seem to get a hold of it.

“Yes to what?” Erik finally blurts out.

And there’s Charles, blooming in the corner of Erik’s mind, _showing_ him what – an entire life together, talking, laughing, _loving_ –

“All of it,” Charles whispers.

He leans in with a determined, focused intent, and – his lips tingle when they brush lightly against his, light as a feather.

Erik closes his eyes with a shiver.

It’s their first kiss. He wants to remember it perfectly – this, _this_ is what he wants to remember until the end, until the stars collapse and the universe crumbles, not just Charles looking calm and peaceful, no, this, them, _together_ –

 _I love you_ , he thinks. _God, I love you, Charles_.

“I love you too,” Charles breathes into his mouth. “I do, I love you – so much – ”

Erik had thought he would have been content, knowing Charles would live a happy, full life with Hank and his sister and whoever else, without him. He thought that that would have been enough. And maybe it would have, but.

Now, he has Charles, Charles has him, they have each other, for as long as they can, and that’s – that’s –

That’s _more_ than enough.

Erik feels Charles’ hand run through his hair, feels the spark of his kiss on his lips, the soft brush of Charles’ mind against his – and he knows with absolute certainty, out of all his years of life, that his summons out of that blasted board of directors meeting last Saturday afternoon was the best thing to ever happen to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This may be the end - but there's an epilogue on the way! It'll probably be out in the next few days. Thanks for sticking with me and this slightly ridiculous premise. (And the two million hyphens that ended up in it, lol.) 
> 
> And hey, hit me up on tumblr: thecornerofthemoon.tumblr.com


	11. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry i suck apparently when i said "a few days" i really meant "over a week" oops. Anyway here's the end! Hope you enjoy this little peek into the future.

 Erik checks his pocket watch for what is probably the fiftieth time this meeting, drifting off to the dull sounds of some budget analyst droning on. After a second or two, he vaguely recognizes that the voice has paused in its endless diatribe.

Raven kicks him in the shin, making him bolt upright. It _hurts_. He’s going to have a bruise there.

“Sorry?” he asks.

A crabby paper-pushing demon is glaring at him through half-moon glasses in disapproval. “If the merger goes through, the assets on our end will have to be shifted around to compensate for any damage to public company stock. My projections indicate that the most suitable assets for this venture include budgets for distribution cost and wiring repair. Is that acceptable?”

Erik nods, even though his eyes have glazed over already from all the jargon. “Absolutely.” He turns to Raven and Azazel. “Anything else to add, or can I sign the damn contract already?”

They grin at him. Raven shakes her head. “Maybe you should ask your merging partner,” Raven suggests.

Erik gives an aggravated sigh, but looks across the table solicitously. “Crystallum Imperatrix?”

She looks amused, with one perfectly sculpted eyebrow raised. “Magnus, really, even after pushing this merger for so long, you look as if you’d rather be a world away from here than finalize it.”

“That’s not – ” Erik splutters. “I mean nothing of the sort, I assure you.”

“Really.”

Thankfully, Raven leans in and takes over for him. “Today’s their anniversary,” she says confidentially. Erik doesn’t know why she bothers, because absolutely every demon at this conference table can hear her every word she’s saying. How embarrassing.

Crystallum Imperatrix smiles serenely at that, sharp eyes turning back on Erik knowingly. “I see,” she says meaningfully. “Happy Anniversary, dear. How many years today?”

Erik fluffs up like a peacock. “Eight,” he answers proudly.

“Eight! Already! That’s marvelous,” Crystallum Imperatrix says with a twinkle in her eye. “Who am I to get in the way of that? Sign the contract and go back to the human world already, Magnus.”

He grabs a pen and scrawls his name down. He passes the paper to her, and she signs the other line.

“There,” Crystallum Imperatrix says, shooing him with a hand. “All done. Tell Charles I said hello, would you.”

“I will,” he promises. Erik glances at his two lieutenants. Azazel graciously nods his permission while Raven just rolls her eyes at him.

“Get out of here, you love-struck idiot,” Raven says with a laugh.

Erik dashes out of there before she can change her mind.

Acidia is waiting on the other side of the double doors for him with a lint roller at the ready. They walk at a brisk pace down the hall together as she brushes him down with a vengeance.

“Your schedule for today is cleared, no more meetings after this one, they’ve been transferred to Azazel and Mystica, so I won’t call you here back at all for any reason other than all-out warfare,” Acidia lists out, rapid-fire. “That suit is fine, but you should wear this tie instead – ” She hands him one with diagonal purple stripes to replace his tile-patterned salmon masterpiece. “ – because really, boss, I’m going to have to burn this one, I don’t know what you were thinking this morning – ”

They turn a corner and go into their office.

“ – going to have to get you a whole new array of ties, but that’s beside the point – right, here’s your enchanted, romantic bouquet,” Acidia says as she stuffs abnormally colorful flowers into his hands. “And here’s your romantic anniversary card.” She shoves the nicely designed card right into the bouquet, which Erik hopes doesn’t damage the flowers.

“Do you have the – ”

“And _here’s_ your specially requested anniversary gift,” Acidia finishes pointedly, slipping a tiny, beautifully wrapped box into his front breast pocket. Try not to raze any more covens or institutions while you’re away, it’ll be a mess to clean up.”

“Right,” Erik says with relief.

“I’ve been arranging this for weeks, _and_ I had to trade in a favor, so don’t mess it up,” Acidia threatens. “Now get going, boss.”

“Well done, Acidia, really, you’ve outdone yourself,” Erik says gratefully. Then he turns to the inter-dimensional portal in the back of his office.

He steps through the threshold and into the long customs line. It’s longer and slower than usual, which Erik supposes doesn’t matter because technically everything that happens in the universal rift stays in the universal rift – the passage of time doesn’t apply, because it’s in between the fabric of space-time. Still.

There’s some irritating, bright orange demon wearing a horribly patterned paisley bowtie at the front of the line that keeps arguing with the poor customs officer about his illegal carry-on bag. Something about the bag holding an ancient cursed object that’s not allowed past the border.

“It’s a pre-paid product for a human customer,” argues tacky bowtie. “I’m just delivering it.”

“All cursed deliveries have to be screened and go through the sanctioned customs office,” the officer repeats, looking harassed and more fed up by the second. “And they’re only allowed to pass the border when delivered by a certified Riftport postman. I’m sorry, sir, but you either have to return to the demon dimension or leave your cursed object with us in customs.”

“This is ridiculous!” Tacky bowtie fumes. “I’m going to complain to management about this!”

He stomps back to whatever demon dimension portal he came from as the customs officer rolls her eyes. “You do that. Next!”

Thankfully, the line moves quickly after that. Erik passes through the scanner, gets pinged for his few harmless charms on the flowers and such, and gets waved on through. He scans his commuter pass at the turnstile, goes right through the 2B portal door, and steps onto the mansion’s green grass lawn in Westchester, New York.

“ – and lastly, you have to check in every month with a demon support center,” Hank’s voice reels off. Erik strides up behind the two demon-children Hank is talking to in reception and patiently waits his turn. “The support package and the pamphlet may help you along, and the distress button will be good for emergencies, but we want to make sure you’re comfortable, independent, and treated respectfully in every area of life for your first year here. If there are any individuals that make you feel lesser in any way, let us know immediately by calling the hotline in the pamphlet and you’ll be relocated.”

“Okay,” one of the blond kids says. “And, uh,” he hesitates, and his little brother elbows him in the side. “Where should we go?” he asks in a furtive undertone.

Hank looks up from his paper-covered desk. “You don’t have somewhere you’re planning on going already?”

The blond brothers shake their heads, looking at their feet instead of back at Hank.

“Right then – both of you, you’re going to apply to the Xavier Sanctuary. Here’s the preliminary paperwork.”

They hunch over the table and start filling the forms out line by line. Hank speaks over their heads, “Magnus, hello, and happy anniversary. Charles is in the aviary.”

“Thank you, Hank.”

The aviary’s large stained glass windows gleam magnificently in the sun, and its turrets tower over the greenhouse next door.

Erik wings up to the highest tower’s perch and alights down on the shiny wood floor.

It’s a sleepy day for the hunters, it seems. The owls are huddled up together and making short, soft cooing noises in the dark corner as they sleep. The lone hawk regards him warily at first, but keeps on preening itself after the nest of young eaglets starts cheeping excitedly at him in recognition. They must think he’s here to feed them – it makes him feel a bit guilty, but he somehow manages to shuffle past them without cracking. Vispilio gets incredibly upset when people throw off the carefully constructed feeding schedules.

He goes down the stairwell and into the tropics section, which is more colorful than he remembers. There are multicolored parrots that are brand new dive-bombing his head, for example.

Erik dodges the assault by cutting through a clearing, and happens on Vispilio.

Zhe’s sitting crosslegged on the tropical jungle floor in a tangle of explosive flowers with zher eyes closed. Twenty or so birds are perched on zher shoulders and head and legs and tail – with all their feathers draping down around zher, Vispilio almost looks like a samba show-girl wearing a wild costeiros.

“Hello, Erik,” Vispilio says serenely, holding perfectly still in zher zen pose as beaks peck feed off of zher skin and groom zher hair. “He’s in forestry.”

“Excellent, thanks.”

Charles likes to read and do paperwork in forestry sometimes. Especially when he’s annoyed with politics.

Sure enough, when Erik passes through the redwoods into the beech trees, he can hear angry muttering and furious scribbling.

“ – damn that insufferable sleazeball, really, he has no actual scientific backing to his so-called ‘expert analyses’ and he knows it, I can literally hear his arrogant crowing through emotional projection from across the room when he gets away with another lie on public record – ”

Charles is sitting at a picnic table under the shade of a massive oak tree, grumbling about some anti-integration politician to a red-bellied robin. Erik leans back against a thin maple trunk, just watching him. Erik thinks Charles is absolutely adorable when he gets all riled up, with his crinkled cross brow and his bratty little frown –

“I heard that,” Charles says dryly without looking around at him. “Bit of a mind-reader, you know.”

Erik grins. “I do know. Who’s the sleazeball this time?”

Charles heaves a sigh. “This up-and-comer anti-integration spokesman,” he says. “Just had an enormous press conference yesterday – Trask, if I remember correctly.”

Charles always remembers correctly. Erik shakes his head with a bit of a smile and leans in to press a quick kiss to Charles’ lips.

“Happy Anniversary,” Erik murmurs.

“And the same to you.” Charles sits back a bit to examine the bouquet. “Are those for me?”

With a flourish, Erik presents his bouquet in a bit of a formal bow. “Why, yes they are, liebling. Straight from hell’s firefields.”

There’s a twinkle in Charles’ eyes. Probably because he knows that Erik chose this gift just because of this upcoming bad pick-up line. Or maybe it’s just the fierce blaze reflected from the petals. “Oh, really?”

“Yes, indeed,” Erik says gravely. “And a master demon florist has expertly enchanted these, so that their flames will be lit forever. Burning into eternity, just like our love.”

Charles groans good-naturedly.

“Terrible, just terrible.” Still, he takes the flowers with a grin twitching at the corners of his mouth. “Thank you, darling, these are stunning. And I have something for you, too – ”

He cradles the bouquet in an arm while he draws a small box out of his palm. Erik rips open the wrapping excitedly. Charles always gives the best gifts, and this will be no exception.

Then he tears away the last of the paper, and –

Erik’s sucks in a breath.

“Wow,” he says with a hint of awe. “How did you – is this – ”

“I channeled a memory into a portrait artist,” Charles says quickly, and shrugs as if it’s completely unimportant. “Simple, really.”

Erik runs a finger down the elegant wooden frame, and traces the glass along the curve of Max’s mother’s cheek. He remembers this very moment – she’d spent an entire day baking, the house smelled like cinnamon and sugar, and he’d bitten into one of her hot scones too soon and burned his tongue, scowling. It had made her laugh.

“It’s perfect,” he says fondly. “Looks just like her.”

He looks up at Charles, whose eyes are sad. “I’ll put it up in the kitchen,” Erik decides. “She would have liked that, I think.”

“Hm, perfect,” Charles says. “I think that’ll do nicely.” They share a chaste kiss and murmur soft thank you’s to each other.

Then Charles stands up and is suddenly bustling for the door. “Now, I’ve made plans for – ”

“Wait, wait, wait – Charles,” Erik says hurriedly, stopping Charles’ advance with a tug on his shirtsleeve.

Charles looks back at him. “What is it?”

“Um,” Erik says eloquently. He thinks of the small gift in his breast pocket –

“Oh,” Charles says, surprised. “You bought me another gift? Erik, you charmer.”

“Well,” Erik hesitates. “I don’t know if you’ll want it, I wanted to talk to you about it before we decide anything, but...”

Charles tilts his head, a concerned line deepening on his forehead. He takes the gift from Erik’s outstretched hand and sits back down at the table.

Erik watches as he methodically removes the frankly excellent wrapping job Acidia had done, paying special attention to Charles’ expression when recognition hits.

His blue eyes go _wide_.

Erik isn’t sure if that’s good or bad.

“Is this,” Charles asks slowly. “What I think it is?”

Erik shifts from one foot to the other. “I know it’s a bit disgusting, but... I thought... I was thinking about the future.”

Charles casts a withering glare at him.

“Your future includes your husband eating a literal _piece of your heart_?” he asks skeptically. His lips have gone awfully thin, and his eyes are flashing dangerously. “You want to sacrifice _your_ life for _mine_?”

Erik wilts a little.

“I’m – it’s not like Shaw – I can explain,” he says anxiously.

“Please do,” Charles says sharply.

“It’s _not_ like Shaw,” Erik insists. He rubs a hand over his face. “Look, the spell Shaw used for life extension was a bastardization, it wasn’t right. This is the real one, er, I mean, the original one. It’s an ancient, traditional demonic binding spell.”

Charles frowns. “What’s its purpose?”

Erik clears his throat. “It’s... Well. It’s when demons bind their, er, life-forces together. For... eternity. Because they’re...” He pauses again despite himself, blushing madly, and forces out, “So in love.”

Charles chuckles a bit at that. “It doesn’t quite explain why I have to have a bite of your heart. We are already married, after all.”

“That’s not – ” Erik shakes his head. “It’s not that. It’s more than that.”

He fumbles for the right words. Charles looks increasingly concerned.

Erik waves an impatient hand around. “Okay, how long does a human usually live?” Erik asks.

Charles raises an eyebrow. “At most... a hundred years.”

“Right. Not very long. I’ve been alive – oh, I forget, really, but you know us demons are practically immortal by your species’ standards.”

“The fact hasn’t escaped me, yes,” Charles says drily.

“So this particular soul-binding spell is _perfect_ for us,” Erik barrels on. “When it binds essences together, it allocates health and life expectancy. You’d live much longer than a normal human. Much, much longer. We’re at eight years together right now, but if we did this, we’d make it eight hundred years at the very least. Which, uh. Is a plus. Maybe. If you think it is. And I... would get to live the rest of my life with you, and not have to wait until the stars burn out and the universe crumbles to finally be with you again.”

Erik looks down at the grass. “I wouldn’t have to... live without you, after you were gone. We’d die at exactly the same time, due to natural causes. If you, uh, wanted.”

There’s a silence.

Then Charles’ hand gently touches his shoulder.

“Oh, Erik, darling,” Charles says with a trembling voice.

All of a sudden, Erik is pulled into a hug. Charles’ love is bleeding into him everywhere they’re touching, and he basks in it like a cat in a patch of sunlight.

“I’d love to,” Charles murmurs. “I do, of course I do – I don’t want to leave you here to suffer for the rest of eternity, who do you think I am, some heartless right-wing politician-magician – ”

Erik hugs him back tightly, and pretends he’s not on the verge of hot tears.

“Darling,” Charles whispers. “Oh, darling, I love you so.”

Erik has a perilous lump in his throat at that, but thankfully, Erik doesn’t need to say it back. He knows Charles can taste it, humming from the tips of Erik’s wings to the core of his essence.

Right then, Erik thanks the mysterious workings of the universe – for giving Charles to him, and for giving him to Charles; it’s going to be a hell of a life together.

He also takes a moment to thank the mysterious workings of the universe for the fact that the favor Acidia cashed in for the expedited binding spell didn’t go to waste. That certainly would’ve made for a rough week or two at the office. 


End file.
